


the time traveler's boyfriend

by nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-06 11:24:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11035206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare/pseuds/nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare
Summary: Shion is working on a drug that enables him to time travel. He can't control where he time travels, or for how long, but in no matter what time he finds himself, it is always to come back to Nezumi's side.Preview:“What’s normal to you?” Nezumi asked, after a moment, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.This was normal. Shion in Nezumi’s present, as he was, was normal. Where Shion went when he left was not normal. It was the time between normalcy.“I have brown eyes and brown hair,” Shion said, glancing back at the mirror, and Nezumi tried to imagine him with such descriptors – it was so ordinary it should not have been so difficult to imagine. “And I didn’t have this scar,” Shion said, tracing his own scar gently with his fingertips as Nezumi had a minute before.“I didn’t know that.”“When I go back to my present – whenever I do – What will I look like?”Nezumi shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen you in your present. You’re the time traveler, not me. I stay here. You come and go.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote and posted this fic in June, 2015, and I'll be reposting it one chapter every day (even though clearly it's already completed). 
> 
> I'm reposting some of my old fics from the many accounts I previously deleted over the past few years, so if you're familiar with my fics and want to request that I repost a certain old fave, feel free to message me at my tumblr: http://coolasamackerel.tumblr.com or comment on this post: http://coolasamackerel.tumblr.com/post/160488980276/danielles-nezushifree-fics and I'll be happy to consider reposting it! For both my new readers and my old guys, hope you enjoy the fic!! :D

(July; Nezumi 9, Shion 26)

None of the other children ever came into Nezumi’s room. Even the facilitators hardly entered.

            Nezumi preferred this. Solitude did not make him lonely. He found comfort in being alone. It was, he had begun to realize, how he was meant to be.

            Because his room was generally inhabited only by himself, he immediately froze upon walking through his door from the showers and seeing the man bent over his desk. Nezumi’s grip on his shower caddy tightened momentarily, but he exhaled softly, forced his hand to relax.

            He did not make a sound, and the man did not turn. The dresser was one of three items of furniture in Nezumi’s room. The bed across from it was the second, and the nightstand between the bed and where Nezumi stood at present was the third.

            Nezumi eyed the intruder. The man was not a child, and not one of the facilitators Nezumi recognized – and Nezumi would definitely recognize him. The intruder had stark white hair, shining somewhat too brightly in a room that had no light, as Nezumi had yet to turn on the light switch.

            Instead of flicking it on, Nezumi took the towel from his shoulders and placed it on the wooden floor, next dropping his caddy carefully onto it – the towel muffling any sound. He proceeded to tuck his wet hair behind his ears, reach out to his nightstand, and open the bottom drawer.

            The man at the dresser also opened a drawer. Nezumi grit his teeth. He had nothing but a few articles of clothing in those drawers, but they were still his, and no stranger had a right to be snooping in them.

            Nezumi wrapped his hand around the knife he kept in the bottom drawer of his nightstand. The facilitators didn’t know about it, of course. He had swiped it from the kitchens one night. Stealing, he’d realized, came easily to him, but he didn’t make it a habit. He took only what he needed, and he didn’t need much.

            Quick steps brought Nezumi inches away from the intruder’s back. Nezumi took a breath, tightened his grip around his kitchen knife, and at that moment, the intruder closed the drawer he’d been looking in and turned around.

            Red eyes found Nezumi without surprise.

            The lack of surprise bothered Nezumi, but it hardly mattered, as the intruder didn’t put up any defenses when Nezumi lunged, reaching up with his free hand to grab the collar of his intruder’s shirt and push him back simultaneously. Nezumi brought his kitchen knife to the intruder’s throat, and it braced against his skin when the man fell against the wall.

            The intruder was clearly bigger and presumably stronger than Nezumi. Only the element of surprise should have made him weak, but even as the man watched him with his weird red eyes, he didn’t seem taken aback.

            Nezumi wasn’t sure how he had managed to pin the intruder to his wall, but the reason didn’t matter much. All that mattered was that he was pinned, with a knife to his throat ensuring he couldn’t escape.

            The red eyes watched Nezumi with only curiosity, and Nezumi glared back, noting the strange scar that wrapped around the intruder’s neck and cheek.

            The guy was an idiot, clearly. He had incredibly distinguishing features, but made no move to cover them up when breaking into other people’s rooms. The least he could have done was a facemask, or colored contacts, or hair dye.

            Nezumi considered that perhaps he was using colored contacts and hair dye, but the thought was fleeting and hardly considered. Despite the absurd appearance, the look was natural on the man, seemingly too natural to be faked.

            And though Nezumi was certain at this point that the man was not a facilitator, he couldn’t help but think there was _something_ familiar with those red eyes. The thought was disconcerting, and the familiarity was by no means nostalgic or safe. Instead, it left Nezumi winded, nearly gasping for air, suddenly certain his lungs had no more room for oxygen, as if they were clogged with something else.

            Nezumi blinked, realizing he’d allowed himself to be distracted by the red eyes, and pressed the tip of his knife further against the man’s neck in a gesture to show both of them that he would not be distracted again.

            “Give me a reason not to kill you right here and now, or I’ll do it,” Nezumi warned quietly, voice low but hard.

            The man hadn’t said a word since allowing himself to be pinned to the wall – as Nezumi could think of it no other way, refusing to let himself be deluded that his own strength was enough.

            At Nezumi’s words, a crease appeared between the intruder’s eyebrows.

            “You aren’t a murderer,” the man said, softly.

            Nezumi felt his heart beating in his fingertips, against the handle of his knife. There was no fear in this intruder’s voice, and there should have been. He had a knife to his neck. He was at Nezumi’s mercy, and his lack of acknowledgement of this fact angered Nezumi, but more than that, confused him.

            Couldn’t this intruder sense danger? Did he not think Nezumi was a threat? Did he not realize just from one look in Nezumi’s eyes that Nezumi did not value any human life before his own?

            The other children, and even the facilitators – Nezumi had heard them talking in whispers one night when he left his room for water – spoke of how Nezumi’s cool gaze scared them, reminded them of something inhumane.

            Could the intruder not detect this quality that must have been written all over Nezumi’s features? Could he not see that Nezumi repelled people? Scared them? Invited only fear and wariness, solitude and distance?

            “You don’t know me,” Nezumi whispered, angry at this man who made him feel as though he was suffocating, as though he didn’t even know himself. Angry at his red eyes that were familiar when they shouldn’t have been, that made him feel hollow and breathless.

            The crease disappeared suddenly from between the intruder’s eyes. “And you don’t know me,” the intruder said, but in a tone that was not nearly so much of a plea as a realization.

            Nezumi blinked. His grip on his knife faltered. He could feel the handle against his wet palm, solid and smooth and warm from his own body heat.

            “I know enough. I know you don’t belong here. You’re an intruder. You broke in.”

            “I didn’t mean to scare you,” the intruder replied, completely calm, as if there wasn’t a knife to his throat.

            Nezumi pressed it further against the skin to remind him.

            He wanted to see fear in the red eyes. He despised the way they looked at him, in understanding, as if he knew Nezumi, as if he saw something Nezumi could never see, something that Nezumi was certain didn’t exist.

            Perhaps the man was crazy, Nezumi reasoned. Escaped from a loony bin. Didn’t understand social cues. Didn’t realize a knife meant danger. Didn’t look at Nezumi’s apparently “cold, unfeeling gaze” and feel fear.

            That he thought Nezumi was scared was surely a sign of this insanity. The thought was absurd. Nezumi wasn’t scared of this red-eyed man.

            Why should he be?

            “I’m not scared,” Nezumi said, and the man smiled, a slight upturn of lips that Nezumi regarded this time not with anger, but with pity.

            The man clearly had no defense mechanisms of his own. No sense for danger. No reflexes or gut feelings to warn him, to keep him alive, to help him survive.

            Another possible reason for the smile, Nezumi realized, was again the insanity. Crazy people smiled without reason – didn’t they?

            Nezumi regarded the man warily, and to his relief, the man stopped smiling.

            “My name is Shion.”

            “Do you think if you tell me your name, I’ll spare your life?” Nezumi bit out, adding in a laugh of his own. Forget insane, it was clear now that the intruder was simply dumb. Breaking in without a disguise. And breaking into an orphanage at that – what did he expect to steal? There was nothing of value here. Nezumi knew this, as he had checked.

            And now, trying to make friends with his apprehender. Perhaps it was the intruder’s first break in.

            Nezumi would make sure it would be his last. He had no use for pity. Had no reason to spare any compassion, not when he’d already been labeled so certainly by everyone around him as compassionless.

            “No,” the intruder was answering. “I think if I tell you my name, you’ll remember it.”

            Nezumi didn’t mean to drop the knife from the intruder’s skin. He hardly realized he was doing it until the intruder rubbed his own fingers against his now free neck.

            The drop of blood that Nezumi hadn’t entirely meant to release streaked across his skin as the man rubbed it.

            “What is that supposed to mean?” Nezumi demanded.

            “I wish I could explain, but I suppose I’ll have to when we see each other again. We’re running out of time. I hope we have longer next time.”

            “Next time?” Nezumi asked, voice trickling to merely a breath on the edge of his demand as he became distracted by the intruder’s changing appearance.

            The man appeared to be blurring at the edges, and at first Nezumi thought there was something wrong with his own vision.

            He rubbed his knuckles to his eyes, and when he dropped his hands again, the intruder had disappeared.

            Nezumi turned wildly, heart beating frantically in his chest, but the man was gone. Even Nezumi himself could not have moved so quickly or silently, but even so, Nezumi raced around his room, checking under his bed, in his closet, even behind his dresser, knife at the ready, pulse ricocheting in his eardrums.

            The intruder was gone. Once he was absolutely certain he was alone in his room again, Nezumi sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the wall, the only place for him to stare and think, as he had no windows.

            Only then did he feel the cool of his wet t-shirt, sticking to his shoulders, and he realized his hair was still wet from his shower. The intruder had hardly been in his room for five minutes, perhaps not even that.

            _Shion._ The name snagged on Nezumi’s thoughts. He didn’t want to remember it, had no reason to recall it, doubted he’d ever see the intruder again – wondered, briefly, if the intruder was even real.

            Even so, Nezumi couldn’t shake the name, nor the red eyes and the deepset feeling that he had seen them in his past, long ago, before his memories ever bothered to stick but for vague echoes of feelings. This particular feeling was hot on his skin, thick in his lungs, fire against his flesh.

            Nezumi closed his eyes, laid back against his bed, let his fingers unravel from his knife. He tried to remember how he knew the red eyes, but it didn’t come to him until he fell asleep, hours later.

            He woke with a gasp, springing up, breathless and sweaty, sheets wound around his wrists and legs like chains, but he didn’t bother untangling himself, didn’t bother even to wipe his sweaty bangs from the hot forehead on which they stuck.

            Despite the proof of sweat and gasps, Nezumi hardly felt hot. Instead, he felt cold, ice trickling through his veins, slipping across his skin as he waited for his breaths to even.

            He finally remembered the red eyes. They stared at him almost nightly from within the swirling smoke of his nightmares, mostly forgotten as he woke but for lingering stains of fear that only a few hours of daylight could melt away.

            Nezumi fell back against his flattened pillow. The nightmares were a tradition, and he fell asleep again quickly after his realization of the red eyes.

            On waking again, this time in the morning as opposed to the middle of the night, the presence of the red eyes in his nightmares was again forgotten, and all that was left was Nezumi’s previous wonder as to why they were so familiar, and how they had managed to so easily disappear.

*

(December; Nezumi 24, Shion 15)

Nezumi was brushing his teeth, mostly with just his own saliva, as he’d hardly been able to squeeze a drop of toothpaste out of the tube.

            He glared at it angrily as he brushed until his glaring was interrupted by a crash in his living room.

            Nezumi spit in the sink, placed his toothbrush back in its cup and glanced at himself in the mirror. He’d just gotten back from a show, and the dregs of eyeliner he hadn’t had the patience to remove still ringed his eyes, but otherwise, Nezumi deemed himself presentable. He caught his lips turned up in the mirror, and stared in near wonderment at his expression, amazed at how the simple sound of the airhead’s appearance could change it so drastically.

            Nezumi regarded his smile warily for another moment, then turned and walked out of the bathroom, where Shion was standing next to a broken lamp, picking up pieces frantically.

            “Hey, don’t touch those, we’ll sweep it up. You’ll cut yourself on the glass,” Nezumi chastised, and Shion looked close to jumping out of his skin, dropping the shards of glass he was holding and stepping back so quickly he nearly fell back onto the bed.

            “Oh – I’m so – I’m not a burglar, I swear, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – I don’t know where I – Or how I – I’m sorry about the lamp, I’ll clean it up, I can definitely pay for a new one, it’s just – I – ”

            “Woah, calm down there, Your Majesty. What are you going on about? You know when you talk so quickly I can’t keep up. And honestly have no desire to. Relax, it’s a lamp. I hardly know why it was necessary for you to break it, but what bullshit is that about replacing it? When have you ever pitched in around here?” Nezumi said, eyeing Shion curiously, as the man was acting rather strange.

            Well, stranger than usual. Which was saying something.

            “I – What – I’m not sure what you – Look, I’m really sorry. I don’t understand what is going on right now, but I think I need to leave this place, wherever it is, I’m not entirely sure, but I need to get to my lab. I expect I had a strange reaction to the drug I was sampling and perhaps sleepwalked over here. Breaking the lamp must have woken me, and I’m sincerely sorry again about – ”

            “Hold on,” Nezumi interrupted, holding out a hand to shut up the kid – and he realized, as he stared at Shion, that he was really just a kid. Gangly and hardly grown into his own body. He had to be a teenager, and Nezumi inspected him with renewed interest.

            The kid watched him back, eyes wide, lips open but clearly stopping himself from speaking – which was a feat for him, Nezumi knew.

            “You don’t know where you are?” Nezumi asked, slowly, and Shion blinked quickly, then looked around the room.

            “I know that sounds crazy, but no, I don’t. I don’t even know how I got here, I swear, I’m not just saying that because you caught me – Not that you caught me, because there was nothing to catch, I really wasn’t breaking in or anything, I just – I just got here,” Shion said, sounding helpless, and Nezumi almost laughed.

            The crease between Shion’s eyes that Nezumi loved to smooth down with the tip of his finger had appeared.

            “Do you know who I am?” he asked, instead of stepping forward and smoothing it down.

            Shion seemed startled at the question. “I’m – I’m really sorry – Should I? I’m certain I’d remember you if I’d seen you before, you have distinct and certainly striking features that I hardly think I’d have the capacity to forget, although as I’ve forgotten how I even got here in the first place, there’s something to be said about the malfunctioning of my memory that might account for me forgetting you if in fact I should know who you are. Have we – Have we met before?” Shion rambled, although Nezumi stopped listening to the ramble halfway through, and only looked up from the gangly body he was inspecting again at the silence.

            “What was that?” he asked mildly, as Shion had clearly asked him a question – he was looking at him in that expectant way of his, crease even deeper, head inclined forward. 

            “Have we met before?” Shion asked, hesitantly, as if embarrassed by his own question.

            He certainly should be, as it was an embarrassing question. They’d met countless times before, each occasion quite memorable, in Nezumi’s opinion – some more than others, of course.

            But Nezumi had long since realized, somewhere in the duration of one of Shion’s monologues, that this may be the first time Shion was meeting him.

            The thought was definitely intriguing.

            “Guess not,” Nezumi replied. “Well, I have. You haven’t. Name’s Nezumi, you’re Shion, pleasure’s all mine and so on and so forth. Okay, we’re acquainted, now come clean this mess you made. I’ll get you the broom, since apparently you don’t know where it is.”

            “Wait – But – Nezumi? Is that what you said? Hold on, how could you have met me when I haven’t met you? I don’t understand, that doesn’t make sense, unless you met me while I was unconscious, but I’d hardly call that meeting, and besides, I couldn’t have told you my name if I was – ”

            Nezumi had walked away to the closet, and returned, broom in hand, which he offered the babbling man – teenager, he reminded himself – in front of him.

            “Shut up and sweep. Clearly, you don’t know what’s going on, so don’t you think it’d be more prudent if I did the talking?” Nezumi sighed, sitting on the edge of their bed when Shion took the broom.

            Shion stared at him for another moment, looked as though he wanted to say something – nothing new there – then nodded and began to dutifully sweep.          

            “I’m going to assume this is your first time,” Nezumi remarked, recalling that Shion had mentioned he’d never shown up anywhere outside of Nezumi’s presence whenever he traveled outside his present.

            “Why would you assume that? I’ve swept before. Not with such a small broom, but I don’t think I’m doing that bad of a job, you’ve hardly given me a minute to – ”

            “No, Your Majesty,” Nezumi sighed, noting that this visit might take some higher degree of patience than usual. “Time traveling.”

            Shion stopped sweeping, and Nezumi regretted not waiting until he was done.        

            “What did you say? Did you say – Time traveling? I – I really did it?”

            “Clearly,” Nezumi said, gesturing to him, and Shion stared down at himself, then looked back at Nezumi, eyes wide and shining, now with excitement.

            “My clothes! They’re not mine! The fashion is a little over a century before my time! Wait – No, I don’t want you to think that I stole them, when I say they’re not mine – Well, they’re not, but I didn’t – I don’t know how I came to be wearing them, I promise I’m not a burglar or thief or criminal,” Shion said earnestly.

            “Yeah, yeah, calm down, do I look like I’m reporting you to the authorities? Your time traveling potion or whatever it is worked, I’m assuming this is the first time – I thought you’d be older, but I guess they put you as a lab rat when you first started working there, makes sense.”

            “I’m not a lab rat,” Shion replied, hands on his hips, one still holding the broom so that it clanged against the nightstand, but Shion didn’t seem to notice or recall the task at hand. “I developed the drug myself, but I didn’t think it was ready yet. The chemical composition matched my notes, which made me confident that drinking it would not harm me, but I was certain particular tweaks would have to be made regarding control as to time period, duration of visit, and destination, especially in the chemical bondage of – ”

            “Stop right there and allow me to inform you, since you don’t know me as yet, that I have no interest in chemical bonds. You made a magic potion. You drink it, and you come here. You’re working on tweaking it so you can choose how long you stay, and in what year you come back to me. Yeah, I’ve heard it all before.”

            Shion was watching him carefully, head slightly tilted. “What year I come back to you?”

            “The eldest you I’ve had the privilege to entertain confirmed you still can’t control much, so I’d give up for a few years if I were you. And yeah, you always come here. No idea why, you’d think you’d bother someone else once in a while,” Nezumi teased, smiling slightly at his airhead, who regarded him with an even more concentrated stare.

            He thought too much, that was for sure.

            “I always come – here?”

            Nezumi waved his hand. “Recently, yeah. Before we moved here, it was that shitty apartment downtown, but you always complained about that, worried you’d show up in the middle of the night and get killed on the street,” Nezumi said, although in truth, Nezumi had been the one to insist they move – he had been the one worried Shion would get hurt with one of his sudden appearances. Sometimes, he appeared when asleep, and although usually he was safely within the walls of their home, occasionally it’d be on the street.

            Still, this particular Shion didn’t know it was Nezumi’s concern that prompted the move. It hardly hurt to offer a white lie.

            “I live here? And can we go back to what you said before – the eldest me, what does that mean? I get older?”

            “People tend to do that with time, yeah,” Nezumi said, reaching up to unwind the few thin braids he’d weaved into his hair for his show that night.

            “So I, I time travel here, when I’m older, that is, so in my future, but in your past? And I live with you when I’m in your present? Are we, I mean, I don’t understand, I’m sorry. But – Who are you?”

            “Nezumi. I said it before, pay attention, if I have to repeat myself this conversation will drag on more than it already is,” Nezumi replied. He’d finished unweaving his braids and pulled his hair into a low ponytail before getting up and heading to the closet to hand Shion a dustpan.

            Shion took it numbly, not even looking at it, staring instead at Nezumi.

            “I didn’t mean your name. Who are you to me?”

            Nezumi leaned in, grinning at the kid’s fresh expression. He was so young, new and shiny. Nezumi wondered if he was too young to make out with. That could pose a problem.

            “I’m your sunshine on a rainy day, Your Majesty. Now finish up, as thrilling as it seems, I have no desire to step on glass.”

            Nezumi decided he wouldn’t kiss the kid until he figured out his age – which he wouldn’t be asking until Shion finished sweeping, or the job might never get done. He leaned away and walked into the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea and glancing out the window.

            It had stopped snowing, the brief flurry Nezumi knew wouldn’t stick that had started on his walk home no longer falling, and already the snow was melting from the grass despite the chill.

            Nezumi listened to the clacking of glass in the dustpan, and a few minutes later, Shion entered the kitchen, announcing himself with his voice, of course.

            “How long have you known me?” he asked, and Nezumi turned from the window, leaned against the counter to observe the kid watching him eagerly from the other side of the stove.

            “Longer than you’ve been alive, I’m starting to think. How old are you, anyway?”

            “Fifteen,” Shion said, somewhat defensively, and Nezumi frowned.

            Not even legal. Still, legality didn’t count with a time traveler, did it? Nezumi contemplated – or tried to, but the airhead interrupted him again.

            “How old are you?”

            “How old do you want me to be?” Nezumi asked, smirking, and Shion blushed faintly, ridiculously cute.

            Certainly, legality had no stake in such cases as these. Shion would hardly mind. He certainly didn’t when he got older.

            “Can you please tell me the truth? I’m trying to figure this out for myself, as unlike you, I’m new to this,” Shion said, fingers raveling into each other.

            He looked a little nervous, and Nezumi wondered if Shion found him intimidating. The thought wasn’t altogether a bad one.

            He wasn’t wearing his cardigan, Nezumi noted. Just a t-shirt and jeans. Quite easy to shed.

            Nezumi attempted to focus, but it wasn’t his fault the teenager’s body was so distracting. It’d been two weeks since his last appearance. There was only so much Nezumi could do on his own, after all.

            “I’m twenty-four. You’ve been popping in from your present since I was a kid. Sometimes you stay for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. Hardly ever more than a week. It’s in correlation to how much of that magic potion you drink. You develop it, though, which takes a long time, and ingredients are sparse and expensive and not necessarily meant for lab worker’s consumption, so yeah, you actually are a criminal, stealing sips of company property to see me. I’m flattered to have made you turn on your morals so greatly.”

            “I didn’t steal anything! I was testing it,” Shion said, looking adorably scandalized at the accusation.

            “Yeah, this time. Not so much in your future. Don’t worry about it, your conscience wore down quite a bit, you’ll get used to it. Anything else you need to know, or can we move on? You’re being rather self-centered, having me go on and on about you. You’re first meeting me after all, I’d think you’d express some interest,” Nezumi said, raising an eyebrow at Shion before turning to grab mugs for the both of them.

            He stuck a tea bag in each before pouring.

            “Why you? Why do I always come to you, when I time travel?”

            “You’re drawn to me,” Nezumi mocked, laughing as he remembered what the idiot had told him once late at night.

            He slid a mug to Shion, who took it as he stared at Nezumi, nodding slowly as if Nezumi hadn’t been joking at all.

            Nezumi shook his head. So his companion had been an airhead from a young age. Not surprising.

            “What’s the oldest age I’ve visited you?”

            “Still talking about you, are we? Twenty-nine, so far. Don’t know what you get up to when you hit your thirties, but I’m assuming you’ve managed to control it by then,” Nezumi said, shrugging.

            When older Shion visited, he seemed more tired, and the visits were less often. Nezumi didn’t ask too many questions about what Shion’s present was like. He’d once caught Shion vomiting into the toilet in the middle of the night when he was twenty-eight, but he didn’t let Shion know he’d seen him, and Shion never mentioned it.

            Nezumi didn’t know if there were health risks to time traveling. Maybe there were, but Nezumi liked to think that Shion would tell him if it was anything serious, and assumed that his lack of older visits was because of the potion’s later perfection. Besides, if Shion had started this research when he was fifteen, surely by thirty he had managed to control it. Found a way so that when he was thirty, he could visit Nezumi at thirty too, come back to him when they were the same age and stay for once.

            Shion blinked, looked away from Nezumi, stared down at his tea. “So…When do I live? In your present, or mine?”

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes, unsure of the question. “Both. And my past, and my future. Benefits of a time traveler, I suppose, lucky you,” he answered lightly.

            It was Shion’s first time traveling experience, after all. He was only fifteen, there was no way Nezumi was getting into the depth of this conversation with him at this age. He hardly enjoyed getting into this conversation when Shion was older, understood his condition, and was actually able to speak knowledgably on the subject.

            Shion glanced up at him from his mug of tea, and Nezumi offered him a smile, reaching out to ruffle the kid’s hair – nothing sexual in that, after all, that had to be safe even for a fifteen-year-old.

            “It’s a lot for that big brain of yours to process. Don’t think too hard, you’ll get a headache,” Nezumi said softly, dropping his hand and walking around the island to stand on the same side of the stove as Shion. He leaned against it and traced the rim of his mug, thinking again on the age issue.

            Although Shion had shown up often since Nezumi was a kid, Nezumi had only met Shion younger than twenty once or twice before. He tried to think about how old he himself was when they started having sex, but time blurred when Shion was involved.

            “Mmm, irritating,” Nezumi commented, accidentally out loud.

            Shion, who’d been staring at him unabashedly – but Nezumi had long since gotten used to that – crinkled his eyes like a confused puppy. “What?” he asked, almost breathlessly.

            What a tease. Nezumi grimaced and turned away, grabbing his mug of tea and heading over to the bedroom. He’d read to get his mind off the kid, he decided.

            Shion followed him, and Nezumi turned to glare at him when they got to the bookshelf.

            Shion was holding his mug in both hands and looking rather nervous. Nezumi could tell he was holding his tongue from spilling out a thousand and a half more questions.

            Nezumi sighed and dropped his hand from the book he’d been pulling out. “Okay, three more questions. But first I ask you one. How long are you here?”

            “In – In the past? I don’t know. Am I supposed to know?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi weaved his fingers through his bangs. Of course the kid couldn’t tell, it was his first time. Typical. “You know in the future, you can tell when you’re going to leave, but never mind. Okay, go, ask away.”

            “What year are we in currently?”

            Nezumi waved a hand. “Am I supposed to keep track? I’m not even sure the month, honestly. A hundred or so years before your time. I’m dead and gone by the time you’re born, we figured that out already. Next,” Nezumi said, because Shion looked like he wanted more information on the current subject, and Nezumi was ready to move on.

            “Um, okay, do you know what happens in the future? Am I allowed to tell you, or does that mess up the whole time continuum?”

            “Yeah, in the future everything’s shitty and nearly everyone is extinct, killed off by some disease or another, I forget the technical name, don’t bother telling me now, I’ll just forget it again. That’s why you’re trying to make this time travel potion. Because you’ve developed a cure, and you want to take it back in time. Trouble is, as you’ll find out – apparently from me telling you, so you’re welcome from saving you the work – you can’t take anything back from your present but your body. Not even your own clothes, as you can see. And you can’t take anything from my present to yours. That’s another thing you’ve been trying to fix. Lots of mistakes for a supposed genius, if you ask me,” Nezumi said, but he didn’t mean it. Shion amazed him, but Nezumi hardly thought fifteen was a good age for his ego to be blown up too much.

            “I told you all that, about my research? That’s confidential,” Shion said, looking slightly alarmed.

            “I won’t tell a soul, I promise,” Nezumi said dryly. “Any last thing you’re dying to know, Your Majesty?”

            Shion breathed deeply, then peered up at Nezumi curiously. “Why do you call me Your Majesty?” he asked, the last thing Nezumi expected.

            Always surprising, the kid was. Nezumi smiled. “Because, as you can see, I’m always at your service. Enough interrogation for now, the sound of your voice isn’t as charming as you seem to think, I need a break. Explore the house, help yourself to a book, do the laundry – I don’t care, but stop bothering me. Actually, I do care, it’s inconsiderate of you to keep expecting me to do your laundry, so your clothes from your last appearance are in that basket over there. You might want to clean them, they’re starting to smell up the place.”

            Nezumi turned back to the bookshelf, grabbed his book again, then lounged on the couch, peeking up from his book after three pages to note that Shion was indeed examining every inch of their living space, making his way slowly to the bathroom, ignoring the laundry completely, of course.

            They were his clothes, so his loss, Nezumi figured, turning back to his book until he heard a shout coming from the bathroom.

            He stood up quickly, dropping his book on the couch he deserted and walking quickly to the bathroom, where Shion was staring himself in the mirror.

            “What’s wrong with me?” Shion asked weakly, not looking away from the mirror.

            “You stole my line. What’s with the shouting? I thought something dramatic had happened,” Nezumi said, leaning against the bathroom doorway.

            “I’m – I’m – What happened to my eyes? And my hair? What’s wrong with me?”

            Nezumi stepped closer, reached out and turned Shion’s face from the mirror towards him with fingers under his cheek. He scrutinized the apparent grounds for Shion’s horror and could find nothing amiss.

            “All in order to me,” he replied, again noting Shion’s youth. His cheekbones were softer, eyes even wider, which Nezumi didn’t think was a possibility.

            “You – You can’t see it? Not even the scar? Is my vision distorted from the time traveling? I didn’t realize that was a side effect,” Shion mused, and Nezumi trailed his fingers from Shion’s chin to the scar on his cheek, following it down to his neck.

            “This scar? Yes, I can see it.” One of his favorite parts of the kid, but then, he had many favorite parts, parts that were strictly forbidden what with the kid’s age, Nezumi reminded himself, reluctantly retracting his fingers.

            “You can? What color are my eyes?” Shion asked, blinking at Nezumi, who watched him carefully.

            “Red,” he replied, after a moment, though he hardly needed a moment to think. The color was so obvious, so vivid. Sometimes, Nezumi thought he saw the eyes even in his dreams, but he never quite remembered what he dreamt about on waking.

            “That’s not – Is that normal, to you? And this white hair, too?”

            “Yes.” It occurred to Nezumi for the first time that Shion did not look in his present as he did in Nezumi’s.

            The thought was jarring and disconcerting. His Shion, surely, with his red eyes, white hair, and seducing scar, must be the real Shion. The right Shion.

            “What’s normal to you?” Nezumi asked, after a moment, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

            This was normal. Shion in Nezumi’s present, as he was, was normal. Where Shion went when he left was not normal. It was the time between normalcy.

            “I have brown eyes and brown hair,” Shion said, glancing back at the mirror, and Nezumi tried to imagine him with such descriptors – it was so ordinary it should not have been so difficult to imagine. “And I didn’t have this scar,” Shion said, tracing his own scar gently with his fingertips as Nezumi had a minute before.

            “I didn’t know that.”

            “When I go back to my present – whenever I do – What will I look like?”

            Nezumi shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen you in your present. You’re the time traveler, not me. I stay here. You come and go.”

            A trace of bitterness slipped into his tone, Nezumi realized too late, and Shion was looking at him again, but Nezumi had already decided Shion was too young to get into this right now, so he brushed it off with a smirk.

            “Are you really so bothered, Your Majesty? I personally rather like the look, and I believe it’s my opinion that counts, as I’m the one with the privilege to look at you all the time.”

            Shion swallowed and smiled lightly, biting his lip.

            Nezumi reminded himself that the kid was currently fifteen.

            “Oh – ” Shion gasped, just as Nezumi had come to the conclusion that he really didn’t give a damn about ethics and just how young this kid happened to be.

            Shion was looking at Nezumi strangely, and Nezumi watched him expectantly, having been waiting for this moment. He couldn’t have drank too much of the potion if he was just testing it, and Nezumi hadn’t even expected him to stay as long as he had.

            “I’ll see you later, Your Majesty. Come back soon, and finish puberty first, will you?” Nezumi said, as he watched Shion blur at the edges before fading away completely.

            Nezumi stared at the space where Shion had been, his gaze sifting through the naked air and landing on the flattened toothbrush tube on the sink that had been blocked from view by Shion’s body just a second ago.

            Nezumi turned away from the empty space and flicked off the bathroom light before resuming his position on the sofa with his book – depositing Shion’s half-filled mug of tea in the kitchen sink on his way.

*

(October; Nezumi 22, Shion 21)

Nezumi woke to Shion playing with his hair. He didn’t want the gentle fingers to leave his scalp, and feigned further sleep, curling his body closer to Shion’s, as on waking, he’d discovered he was very cold.

            He hadn’t expected Shion to be in bed when he woke. Even though Shion mentioned drinking more potion than ever before, he’d already stayed ten nights. Eleven was a new record.

            When Nezumi noted that he had to pee, and couldn’t hold it any longer, he opened his eyes and caught Shion staring down at him.

            “Hi,” Shion said.

            “I have to pee,” Nezumi replied. He stretched, limbs overlapping Shion’s, and peeing didn’t seem so dire anymore.

            Instead, he kissed Shion’s bare shoulder and slipped his hand under Shion’s boxers.

            “I thought you had to pee,” Shion said, turning his lips to press against the top of Nezumi’s head.

            “You thought wrong, Your Majesty,” Nezumi murmured, leaning up on an elbow to kiss Shion fully, but Shion pushed him away.

            “You taste horrible, go pee and brush your teeth.”

            “Why do you taste minty?”

            “I brushed my teeth already.”

            “And got back in bed?” Nezumi asked, amazed. The guy could have at least made breakfast if he was already up.

            “You looked lonely,” Shion said, smiling, and Nezumi sat up and turned away to hide his frown.

            He wasn’t lonely. Not with Shion beside him, and not when Shion left. Nezumi was never lonely.

            He knew, of course, that Shion hadn’t meant any ill will, but that didn’t stop the irritation, which ebbed away only after Nezumi had successfully peed, brushed his teeth, pulled on a pair of boxers that had been flung on top of the bookshelf, and found Shion in the kitchen making breakfast.

            _You’re still here,_ he wanted to say, but it was an unspoken rule that they didn’t talk about Shion’s comings and goings unless necessary.

            It was easier to pretend they didn’t exist, this way.

            “We need more eggs, I’m using the last of them,” Shion said, cracking two in a bowl of flour.

            Nezumi sat on a stool at the island and watched him. He didn’t know whether he’d have to buy for one or two, but didn’t ask. It was too early for this type of conversation anyway.

            Instead, he asked a harmless question. “Making pancakes?”

            “Mm hmm,” Shion agreed, stirring the concoction.

            “We should go to the hardware store after. To get paint for the bathroom.”

            Shion paused in his stirring, then resumed. “Yeah,” he agreed softly, then – “I won’t be here though, so if you want to wait, we can buy the paint and keep it so I can help you.”

            Nezumi watched the batter pour into the pan, running straight to the edges before Shion tilted the bowl up at just the right moment, cleaning the edge with a spoon.

            “When?” Nezumi asked, to the pan of batter, knowing he didn’t need to specify what he was asking.

            “After breakfast.”

            “It was a long time.”

            “Yeah,” Shion agreed.

            “Don’t get in trouble at the lab,” Nezumi said, glancing up at Shion, who was looking at him.

            “I know.”

            “If they kick you out, we’re fucked.”

            “I’m twenty-one. You said just before I got here I visited at twenty-eight. We don’t have to worry, at least not for a while,” Shion replied.

            Nezumi didn’t say anything. Shion was right.

            They ate their pancakes and talked as if Shion wasn’t leaving soon. Nezumi washed their dishes afterward, handing them to Shion to dry. On the second plate, Nezumi attempted to hand the dish to Shion, but Shion pushed it back.

            “Keep it,” he said, and Nezumi nodded, not bothering to watch Shion blur at the edges. Instead, he turned to place the plate in its cupboard, turning back to finish the dishes on his own.

*

(October; Nezumi 22, Shion 28/Shion 21)

Nezumi noted that the paint was peeling in the bathroom, and stood staring at it, wondering if it was bad enough that it’d need another coat, when he heard Shion.

            “Nezumi?”

            He left the bathroom and surveyed the empty living room before finding Shion in the kitchen, sitting against a cupboard, his hair disheveled and bags under his eyes.

            “Hey,” Nezumi said, offering a hand to Shion, who took it and allowed himself to be pulled up, but he swayed on the spot, and Nezumi led him to a stool. “You okay?”

            “Fine. I’m not staying long. I barely drank anything, and the stuff I had was diluted.”

            “Is that why you’re…” Nezumi trailed off, surveying Shion carefully. He didn’t know how to describe him. _Not right_ was the first thing that came to mind.

            “They know someone is taking the drug. Output percentage is too varied from what is expected with the supply. Security is heightened, but I wanted to see you. It’s been so long,” Shion murmured, head lolling forward, and Nezumi caught it, held him up with Shion’s cheek in his palms.

            “I just saw you last month,” Nezumi said.

            “I haven’t seen you,” Shion replied. “Nearly a year.”

            Nezumi contemplated him. “How old are you?”

            “Twenty-eight.”

            “Don’t dilute the potion anymore. I don’t think this is right,” Nezumi said. Shion’s skin wasn’t as warm as usual. He didn’t feel as solid.

            “Nezumi – Shit, I’m leaving.”

            “Shion, don’t dilute it again, okay?” Nezumi asked again, but he was talking to no one, palms cupping nothing. “Shit,” Nezumi cursed.

            “Tsk tsk, such language,” Shion replied, and Nezumi spun around, found a younger Shion smiling at him. “Do you kiss your boyfriend with that mouth?”

            “When did you get here?”

            “Just as you cursed at that stool. Hi, I missed you,” he said, stepping forward and kissing Nezumi, who kissed back for a moment before gently pushing him back.

            “You were just here. You just missed yourself, at twenty-eight.”

            “Ooh, that’s a bummer, I wish I’d gotten here earlier. That was fun, last time there was two of us. Remember?”

            It wasn’t something Nezumi expected he would ever forget, and although the memory was a particularly pleasurable one, it couldn’t quite lift the heaviness left by the older Shion, the feeling of his skin cold against Nezumi’s palms.

            “Nezumi, are you okay?” Shion asked, and Nezumi looked at him, tried to make sense of his healthy face, the lack of bags under his eyes, his clear happiness under the concern.

            “Fine,” Nezumi replied.

            Shion regarded him for another second, then grinned. “I’ll be here for a while, by the way. Week and a half, I think.”

            Nezumi blinked. That was a lot of drug, he knew, and he thought of the new security measures, but of course, this younger Shion was experiencing none of that.

            “Great,” Nezumi said, turning away so Shion couldn’t read any of this on his expression, “you can help me paint the bathroom then. It needs a new coat desperately, and not some cheap paint this time, that stuff peels.”

            “Sure thing, Nezumi,” Shion said, cheerfully. “We can do whatever you want, we’ve got time.”

*


	2. Chapter 2

(July; Nezumi 19, Shion 17)

Nezumi laid in bed as still as possible, waiting for the occasional brief moments of bliss when a small wind would find its way through the open window.

            He didn’t know how much longer he could keep living in this shitty apartment. It almost made him miss the orphanage.

            Almost.

            He could feel himself shriveling in the heat after an hour or so of lying down and sweating, so he stood up slowly, conserving as much energy as possible as he walked to the kitchen. He turned the sink on and attempted to pour himself a cool glass of water, but the sink only ran lukewarm, and the refrigerator had been broken for the past three days.

            Nezumi groaned and dumped his warm glass of water down the sink before turning and seeing Shion in front of him.

            Relief was immediate. A distraction from the heat was just what he needed, though he was hardly certain he had enough energy for sex. Maybe Shion would volunteer to do all the work.

            “Hi,” Shion said, but Nezumi had no desire to talk to him, and leaned over, curling a sweaty hand into Shion’s hair as he kissed him.

            The time traveler’s lips were warm, and Nezumi pulled away. On second thought, this distraction might be counterproductive.

            Nezumi turned away, grabbing a book from the floor and fanning himself with it.

            “I’m gonna have to apply to that theater you were talking about, this apartment is shit, and I can’t do another summer without air conditioning. Do I get decent roles, at least? I know what you’re like about telling me stuff from my future, but if you could just give me a hint, I’d make it up to you,” Nezumi said, glancing over his shoulder at Shion, who hadn’t spoken much since he’d arrived, Nezumi noticed.

            The man was standing where Nezumi had left him, beside the sink, one hand over his lips and eyes wide on Nezumi.

            “What? Are you disappearing already? You just got here,” Nezumi complained.

            “Is that – Do we do that?” Shion asked, barely a whisper, not moving his hand from over his lips to make him even more incoherent.

            “What?” Nezumi snapped. The heat made him irritable. He held his sweaty bangs up from his forehead and stared at Shion, who stared back.

            “I’ve never kissed you before,” Shion said, after a minute, and Nezumi squinted at him.

            He realized this Shion was younger than usual, and tried to remember if the kiss had been a good one.

            Hot and sweaty, as Nezumi recalled it. He winced, dropping his hand from his hair.

            “Ah. Right. Yeah, we do that, Your Majesty, sorry I didn’t make it magical, I’m a bit too hot to sweep you off your feet as usual at the moment. I’ll buy you roses for your first blowjob, I swear.”

            “When will that be?” Shion asked, and Nezumi laughed.

            “I don’t know. I’ve already given it to you, I remember when you told me it was your first, and if I recall – Ah, shit, I didn’t get you roses. You should have reminded me, I could hardly have remembered myself, it was a year ago. You were twenty, I think. You’re twenty a lot. How old are you now?”

            “Seventeen,” Shion said.

            Damn, three years. That was a long time to wait for a blowjob, in Nezumi’s opinion, even with the high quality of his performance. He wondered if he could change time.

            He’d never seen Shion younger than twenty. He eyed Shion jealously. It was hardly fair that Shion had seen Nezumi at nearly every age he’d been, and Nezumi mostly saw Shion in his early twenties, at ages so close that there wasn’t much variety.

            “I’ve only time traveled twice before. Once, you were twenty-four. The second time, you were twenty-two. How old are you now?” Shion was asking.

            “Nineteen. The age of the shitty apartment. Look, three years is a long time to wait to get blown. I don’t have roses at the moment, but if you can spare them, I can make it worth your while,” Nezumi said, grinning. He liked the idea of a younger Shion. He was so used to being the younger one. This could be interesting.

            Shion blinked at him, looking incredibly serious. “Yes,” he said, and Nezumi grinned wider.

            “Great. Come here.”

            Shion walked over slowly. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt, and Nezumi caught the hem of it when Shion was in reach and pulled it so that the kid would walk faster.

            He stumbled into Nezumi’s chest, and Nezumi caught him.

            “Because the drug is so new, there’s a lot of security. I think the reason why I see you a lot when I’m twenty and onward is maybe I reach a higher level of security access, which is not currently available to me at my age, even though I created the basis of the formula for the drug. So it’s harder for me to steal it, and I – ”

            Nezumi was used to Shion’s babbling. That he did so with increasing speed when he was nervous was not altogether surprising, and mostly easy to ignore, as Nezumi tipped Shion’s chin up, kissed his neck, tried to relax the kid, wanted to taste him as a teenager.

            “Also I think it might be important to note that while this is probably very normal for you, this is technically my third date with you, and I’m not sure I’d call the first one a date. At least the last time I saw you was a date because you bought me flowers and took me to dinner, but the first time you didn’t even – Oh – ”

            At first, Nezumi thought Shion’s gasp was from pleasure, as his hand had just found Shion’s waistband.

            A second later, Nezumi realized it was not pleasure, but the usual sensation of leaving, as Shion was gone, completely without warning, leaving Nezumi just as hot as he was before, and now horny on top of that.

            “Great, Shion, it’s your own fault you have to wait three years,” Nezumi sighed to no one, then collapsed back on his bed to resume his solitary sweating.

*

(December; Nezumi 14, Shion 24)

Shion had been moping all day since he appeared, and although Nezumi had thought he would enjoy any rare moment of silence in the time traveler’s presence, it was getting a little disconcerting.

            Nezumi tapped one of his dominoes hard against the floor, and Shion glanced up at him.

            “Oh, is it my turn?” Shion asked, looking at the trail of dominos laid out between them.

            “No. What’s wrong with you?” Nezumi demanded.

            They no longer had to keep their voices low, as Shion was now a “prospective adoptive parent.” Of course he couldn’t officially adopt Nezumi, what with his lack of paperwork, address, and identification, but at least now he could visit and not have to hide from the rest of the kids or facilitators.

            “What do you mean? You said it was your turn, what should I be doing?”

            “Not the game. There’s something else. Since you got here you’ve been quiet and sad or something. If you don’t want to tell me, fine, but don’t pretend there’s nothing wrong.”

            “Oh. Sorry, it’s nothing. Don’t worry,” Shion said, giving Nezumi a small, awkward-looking smile and looking quickly back at his dominoes.

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t worried. He just figured Shion wouldn’t keep secrets from him. It was stupid, on second thought. Everyone had secrets, even blabbermouth Shion.

            It occurred to Nezumi, hours later when Shion still would hardly look at him, that perhaps this particular secret was not Shion’s alone to keep.

            “Does it have to do with me? In the future?”

            “What?” Shion asked, not looking up from the book he was reading where he sat at the foot of Nezumi’s bed, while Nezumi reread _Romeo and Juliet_ sprawled across the mattress beside him.

            “If whatever is bothering you has to do with me, you have to tell me.”

            Shion closed his book and looked at Nezumi, who sat up, closing his book as well.

            “It has to do with future you,” Shion said slowly, after a minute. “Not present you. You don’t have to worry about anything right now.”

            “Tell me. You have to tell me,” Nezumi said, folding his arms over his chest.

            Shion looked at him for a long moment, and Nezumi tried to understand his expression. Usually, Shion was so easy to read. Laughably easy, actually.

            Now, all Nezumi could see was sadness, and he didn’t understand why. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Shion sad before. It felt weird. Nezumi wasn’t stupid like the other kids who thought adults didn’t have any problems, but Shion – Shion was different. He’d always been different.

            “Okay, Nezumi. Two months ago, well, two months ago in my present, I visited future you. You were in your twenties. And you – We got in a fight. So I’m sad because of that.”

            Nezumi thought about this. He couldn’t imagine fighting with Shion. The guy was annoying, and sure, they bickered constantly, but what could they ever have to fight about? Fights were between people who had things to fight over. He and Shion only had sporadic days, never enough time to get angry with each other.

            “What was the fight about?”

            Shion looked down at Nezumi’s bedspread and picked at a loose thread. “You hadn’t seen me for a while. And you were… It’s complicated, Nezumi,” Shion sighed, peeking up at him from under his eyelashes.

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes. Adults said that all the time – _It’s complicated._ But Shion never said that to him, even though Shion was the most complicated person Nezumi knew.

            He always explained things. He always treated Nezumi as if he knew Nezumi had the capacity to understand.

            “You’re fourteen right now, right? This is adult stuff.”

            “Right,” Nezumi said, dryly, turning away from Shion and getting off the bed. He stood in front of his dresser and opened drawers absently, glaring at his small selection of clothes. “When are you leaving?” he asked, not looking away from the drawers. “It’s taco day tomorrow, very exciting. I should get some sleep.”

            Sometimes, Shion spent the night. Nezumi had stolen a roll-up sleeping bag that they used for camping and kept it in his closet.

            “I have another few hours. I thought – I wanted to see you at the age you were when we fought. It was a long shot, I wish I had some control – I just don’t like how we left things, I wanted to – I wanted to talk to you – ”

            Nezumi spun around, hands in fists. “I’m right here. Talk to me. Is that why you’re sad? Because I’m just a kid, and you don’t give a crap about me until I’m older like you?”

            Shion stood up from the bed, took a step closer to Nezumi, who took a step back, feeling the dresser press into his back.

            “No,” Shion said, too genuinely like he always said things, with too much feeling. He was too sentimental, this Shion. He acted like Nezumi was the child, but Shion was the one who was immature, irresponsible, didn’t take any measures to protect himself at all. “Nezumi, I enjoy being with you at any age. Whenever I get to see you – I – It’s – I don’t know how to explain it to you. I don’t know what to say to make you understand. Every you is my favorite you, and the way I feel about you never changes.”

            Nezumi took a breath and held it. He didn’t always understand Shion. The guy selfishly refused to tell him anything about the future, but the one thing Nezumi knew was that Shion was in it.

            The thought never particularly bothered him before. Shion had always been there, except for when he was a really little kid. He was just a part of existence. Sometimes Nezumi forgot that every person didn’t have their own Shion, their own time traveler, paying them random visits at various ages, staying for a few hours or days before poofing off again.

            Nezumi was beginning to grasp that Shion was his own person. He had his own life that he took himself away from, just to visit Nezumi.

            Why would he do that? Why would anyone snap himself out of his own present? Nezumi understood that some people wanted to escape their lives, but from what Shion had told him, his life was hardly miserable enough to want to escape, and anyway, Shion didn’t seem to Nezumi like someone who would run away when things got tough.

            So the only reason for taking himself out of his life was so that he could come into Nezumi’s. Nezumi could hardly comprehend it.

            He exhaled slowly, eyed Shion’s small smile warily, wondered what exactly Shion felt for him anyway, what never changed, how he could even say such a thing – everything changed. Nothing lasted. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sunsets were only special because they were momentary, after all, isn’t that what everyone said?

            “Maybe that’s enough for now, right? I don’t want to overwhelm you,” Shion was saying.

            “I’m not overwhelmed,” Nezumi snapped back, and Shion’s smile grew.

            “Yeah, it’s hard to overwhelm you, I’ve realized. Hey, want to act out a play? What were you reading?”

            “ _Romeo and Juliet_ ,” Nezumi replied, and Shion nodded happily, his mood seemingly shed, though Nezumi wasn’t so naïve, knew Shion was purposely trying to change the subject.

            Still, he let Shion pretend, and offered him the book – he had most of the lines memorized anyway, unlike Shion.

            “I’ll be Romeo,” Shion said, striking a pose, and Nezumi shoved him.

            “I want to be Romeo.”

            “Fine, even better, I’ll be Juliet.”

            “You die first,” Nezumi taunted, watching Shion flick through the play to whatever scene he wanted to start at.

            “That’s not always the worst thing,” Shion said, so nonchalantly it caught Nezumi off guard, but then Shion was spouting lines, and Nezumi had to keep up, forgetting Shion’s strange mood and stranger words for the time being.

            They acted, running around the room and taking multiple roles – Nezumi chose Mercutio, Paris, and the apothecary, while Shion chose Tybalt, the nurse, and the remaining minor roles – until a facilitator informed Shion that visiting times were over.

            He left dutifully, then snuck back in through the window in the bathroom, slipping into Nezumi’s room and lying on the sleeping bag Nezumi set up for him.

            Nezumi fell asleep before Shion disappeared.

*

(October; Nezumi 24, Shion 24)

Nezumi had just climaxed, was relaxing over the naked body below his, when he heard Shion.

            “Nezumi?”

            He flipped over so quickly he fell off his bed and stared up from the floor at Shion, who had appeared in his living room for the first time in nearly two years.

            “Shit,” he cursed, as the man on his bed shouted –

            “Hey, what the hell, who are you?”

            “Calm down, get out,” Nezumi said, standing up and throwing the guy’s pants at him.

            It was a coworker from the theater, which was even more annoying. If Shion had walked in on a stranger at least Nezumi wouldn’t have to bother making up some excuse to the guy after he kicked him out.

            “Has this guy been here the whole time? What is going on, Nezumi?” the actor demanded. Not making any move to get dressed and escort himself out, Nezumi noted.

            “Nothing. Don’t worry about it, just go,” Nezumi sighed.

            “I can – I can go – Nezumi – ” Shion was spluttering, and Nezumi glared at him, noted that Shion’s heart looked a bit ripped open, hated that the man always wore his emotions on his sleeve.

            It made Nezumi feel guilty, and Nezumi had no use for that, no reason for that. Shion was the one in the wrong. Refusing to show for twenty months – what was Nezumi supposed to do? Wait on his ass for the time traveler forever?

            “This is fucking weird,” Nezumi’s coworker was saying, but at least he was finally mobilizing, muttering under his breath as he pulled on his jeans, grabbed his shirt from the floor, and slammed the door on the way out.

            Nezumi exhaled and watched Shion, waiting for him to speak first. Nezumi had nothing to explain, and didn’t bother pretending he did.

            “Who – Who was that?” Shion asked, finally, after a minute of staring. His voice was small, and the house suddenly felt too quiet, amplifying the timid syllables.

            “A coworker,” Nezumi replied, pulling his hair from his sweaty skin into a ponytail and stooping down to pull on his own jeans, not bothering with his boxers.

            “Is he – Are you – Nezumi, I don’t understand,” Shion said, helplessly.

            Nezumi wasn’t particularly fond of Shion’s helpless expression, the sad pull of Shion’s wide eyes, the way Shion squeezed his waist too tightly with gripping fingers, but he hadn’t seen Shion in over a year and a half. He hadn’t known if he would ever see Shion again. Nezumi couldn’t look away.

            “What is there to understand, Shion?” Nezumi asked, keeping his voice level. He wanted to yell at the guy, but there was no reason. Shion had no control over the times in Nezumi’s life he visited.

            Shion was a genius, had concocted a drug that allowed actual time travel, but he couldn’t do this one damn thing, he couldn’t prevent twenty-month stretches of nothing, of waiting, of giving up.

            Shion’s searching expression grew more desperate. “Don’t pretend we aren’t – ”

            “What, Shion, what are we? Boyfriends? Is that what you think you are, Shion? My boyfriend? Last time I checked, boyfriends didn’t just disappear for nearly two years. What the fuck was I supposed to do, Shion? How was I even supposed to know you’d come back? I’m not the one with the fucking potion, Shion. I can’t just see you whenever the fuck I want. That’s on you – ”

            “Nezumi, I just saw you two months ago – ”

            “Maybe you saw me, but I can promise you, it wasn’t within the last year and a half of my life cause I sure as hell haven’t seen you. Dammit, what do you want me to do? Wait for you? Without knowing you’ll come back? It doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t make sense,” Nezumi realized, shaking his head. “It’s bullshit, I’m dead by the time you’re born, I’ve been long dead, how the hell are we supposed to have a relationship? How did you really think this could work?” Nezumi asked, stepping closer and closer to Shion as he talked, watching the man shrink back but not caring one bit, Nezumi had to know, had to understand what was going on in Shion’s head that any of this made sense to him.

            It was ridiculous. The idea that they could work as whatever the hell they’d been pretending they worked as was just fucking ridiculous.

            “Nezumi, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wish I could – I wish I had visited, I don’t know how, I don’t know how to choose, I’m trying, I am, but I can’t – ”

            Nezumi sighed, ran a hand through his bangs, shook his head. “I’m not asking you to try. If you could figure it out, you would have done so already. It can’t happen. You can’t choose what year you appear in, and fine, I get it. It’s time for you to get it.”

            “No, no – How old are you?” Shion asked, desperate, like it mattered.

            “I’m twenty-four, Shion.”

            “Okay. Okay, a few months ago, I visited you, and you were twenty-eight. So you know – even if there are long stretches in between, I’ll come back – ”

            “Oh yeah? What about twenty-nine? Ever seen me at twenty-nine? What if that visit when I’m twenty-eight is the last time in my present that I see you? You want me to keep waiting? Is that what you want, Shion? For me to put my life on hold until you grace me with your presence again?”

            “Stop it, Nezumi, stop it! I don’t want you to put your life on hold – ”

            “Then what the fuck do you want? I don’t get it, why the hell do you come here anyway? What do you want from me?”

            “Nothing! Nezumi, I don’t want anything, I just want to see you, I just want to see you,” Shion said, and he was crying, and Nezumi wanted to wrap his arms around the man, to wipe the tears from his face, to hold him close because it’d been nearly two years since he fucking touched Shion, he forgot what it felt like, to touch someone, to feel warmth – it was the reason why he’d finally accepted his coworker’s offer, it was the reason Shion had appeared to find a stranger in their bed.

            “Shit. Shit, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know, Shion. You can drink your freaking potion whenever the fuck you want to see me, but what can I do?” Nezumi demanded.

            He hated the loneliness that crept up on him as he waited, week after week, for his time traveler to appear. Hated when it had been a year, and Nezumi finally acknowledged that the hollow feeling in his chest was indeed loneliness – he’d never felt it before, at least, not since he could remember. He had been alone for so long, but no one had ever made him feel lonely the way Shion had – and Nezumi hated him for it, hated him so goddamn much, hated himself even more for allowing Shion to ruin him so easily.

            “I’m sorry. Nezumi, I’m sorry. I’ll figure it out, I promise, we’ll figure this out, please don’t give up on me, I need you to trust me, I need you to just wait a little longer, and I’ll figure it out, I promise, I promise – ”

            “Shut up, Shion,” Nezumi snapped. He was still pissed, even more than before because somehow, even with Shion standing in front of him, Nezumi couldn’t shake the hollowness in his chest, the chill on his skin, the weight of his loneliness.

            This Shion wouldn’t last, and he knew that. The man would disappear as he always did. Nezumi would be left as he always was, wondering when his time traveler would return.

            “Nezumi,” Shion said, voice cracking, and he stepped forward, pressed his forehead against Nezumi’s collarbone, sobbed into Nezumi’s bare chest, repeated Nezumi’s name between his sobs.

            Nezumi curled his fingers into fists. It took everything not to wrap his arms around this man. It took everything not to tell Shion it was okay, it was fine. It took everything not to try and fill the hollow in his chest with the feel of Shion’s warmth.

            Instead, Nezumi stood incredibly still, and only when Shion’s sobs abated somewhat did he speak.

            “When are you leaving?” he asked, coolly, and Shion glanced up, face wet and puffy.

            “Nezumi – ”

            “When, Shion?”

            When Shion inhaled, his breaths hitched audibly, shaking his chest in a way Nezumi watched, wondering if the man felt just as hollow as he.

            “A few minutes,” Shion whispered, and Nezumi stepped back.

            “Shit, Shion. What the fuck was the point? I was supposed to wait twenty months for a few minutes?”

            “I didn’t know – ”

            “Maybe you should just go now,” Nezumi interrupted, eyes narrowed at Shion, wishing he would disappear because if he didn’t soon, Nezumi knew he would give in, step forward, touch this man he hadn’t touched in so long, kiss the lips he hadn’t kissed in too long.

            “I – I can’t – You know it doesn’t work like that – ”

            “Yeah, whatever,” Nezumi snapped, turning away from the man he loved – and he did love Shion, it wasn’t a question, Nezumi no longer mulled on it as he had in his late teens and early twenties, wondering if such a feeling was even real.

            It was real. Nezumi knew that now. But he also knew it didn’t fix everything. It didn’t solve anything. It didn’t ensure happy endings.

            It did nothing but hollow a person out, ruin what guards Nezumi had put up, tear the walls he had created to keep himself safe from this bastard who showed up into his life saying Nezumi had no reason to be scared.

            What a liar, he was.

            “Nezumi, I won’t leave like this,” Shion was saying, but Nezumi knew that was just another lie. He grabbed his t-shirt from the floor, pulled it on as he shoved his bare feet into his boots, and walked out the door before he had to watch Shion disappear yet again.

*

(October; Nezumi 24, Shion 26)

Nezumi was still pissed with Shion when the man appeared again, a week after Shion had found Nezumi having sex with his coworker.

            This time, when Shion appeared, Nezumi was fully clothed and cooking.

            “It needs salt,” Shion said, and Nezumi turned around from the sink to see Shion licking a spoon.

            Nezumi stared. Shion appeared completely happy, undisturbed, and it was a second before Nezumi recalled that their universes weren’t parallel. This Shion hadn’t just fought with Nezumi a week before. Nezumi tried to tell if this Shion looked older or younger than the Shion he’d yelled at, but he wasn’t sure.

            “Why are you looking at me like that?”

            “Last week I broke up with you,” Nezumi said, slowly, though it wasn’t entirely true. Still, he’d meant to. It wasn’t his fault Shion had pissed him off too much for him to even get the words out.

            “You what? You never – Oh – Are you twenty-four?” Shion asked, eyes wide.

            Nezumi watched him carefully and nodded.

            Shion reached over the counter for the salt and added it to the soup himself, then stirred it with a spoon, not looking at Nezumi when he spoke. “I remember that. It’s been two years since that happened, for me. I wanted to come back to this time so badly, I tried for months, I was desperate to talk to you and resolve it. But I kept catching you too young, when you didn’t know it happened, or too old, when you were seemingly over it. So I knew it would resolve somehow, but I didn’t know how. I suppose that’s what has to happen right now.”

            “What, so I’m supposed to just agree that everything is fine because you say in my future I’m over it?” Nezumi asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “That doesn’t say much for my free will.”

            “I’m not trying to take away your free will, Nezumi. That’s why I don’t like to tell you about your future. But I do know that I continue to visit you when you’re older, and we’re not broken up. If you want to try and change that, you can. I won’t stop you. But we make this work. I know we do. It’s hard, but we do it.”

            “Right. And that makes everything better. That little spiel fixes the fact that you’re not even in your own fucking present right now, that we can’t even have a proper fight because you disappear halfway through, and you still think we can have some sort of relationship,” Nezumi said, voice hard, but he wasn’t really angry.

            He wanted to believe Shion. He wanted it to get better. He never wanted much – just worked for what he needed – but Shion changed that. He was something Nezumi knew he didn’t need to survive. He was something Nezumi only craved out of want, out of desire, out of nothing else but his own selfishness. He did not depend on Shion to live, but he still depended on the man, and Nezumi could not fathom this, could not wrap his head around this, and that scared him more than anything.

            “I don’t think it fixes everything, no. But I believe in us. Nezumi, I’ll never give up on you unless you tell me that you want me to. I know I can trust you to be honest. Do you want me to?” Shion asked, but he already knew the answer.

            Of course he did. He knew Nezumi’s future, knew that he was in it, just as Nezumi knew Shion’s future, had seen the man at twenty-eight, at twenty-nine, knew he kept coming back.

            Instead of answering, Nezumi leaned forward, reached out, touched Shion’s face gently before kissing him. It was the first time in nearly two years, and Nezumi was so goddamn hungry for him.

            Screw his anger. Nezumi was sick of it.

            Shion kissed him back, eagerly, and remembered to turn off the stove before letting Nezumi pull him to the bedroom.

            Nezumi was too quick, worried that Shion would disappear, and came too fast, but Shion didn’t seem to mind, and Nezumi didn’t feel embarrassed.

            He just felt whole again, and absolutely terrified because of it.

*

(April; Nezumi 27, Shion 20)

The first thing Nezumi did when Shion politely informed him that this was only his fifth time meeting him was ask the boy if they’d had sex yet.

            “Um, well, no, not yet, although I am aware at this point that it’s a rather common thing with us, right?”

            Nezumi smirked. “Sure, you could say that. Wanna lose your flower now?” Nezumi was always fascinated when young Shion visited him. He was even more naïve than the Shion Nezumi was used to. He was nervous around Nezumi, which amused Nezumi immensely. Shion was always fun to taunt, but even more so when he hardly knew Nezumi.

            “Now? Wouldn’t it be better if we got to know each other more? I’ve only met you four times before, I hardly know anything about you.”

            “I know everything about you. More than you know, actually. Want me to show you a few things?” Nezumi asked, stepping closer.

            Shion stared up at him, and Nezumi could tell the idiot was thinking it over.

            So easy to seduce. At least that never seemed to change.

            “If we have sex, does that mean – Are you my boyfriend?” Shion asked, and Nezumi laughed.

            “Do you want me to be?”

            “I don’t know, I don’t know you!” Shion stammered, cheeks darkening.

            “Here’s your chance to get to know me,” Nezumi said, smiling, reaching out and ruffling the kid’s hair.

            He was being slightly cruel, and he knew it. Possibly pressuring the kid, but Shion had never complained to Nezumi about his memories of his first time, so Nezumi assumed that it was fine however it happened.

            Shion looked up at Nezumi, then nodded.

            “First things first – How much of your magic potion did you drink?” Nezumi asked, not wanting Shion’s first time to be marred by a sudden unfortunate disappearance.

            “The time traveling drug? I could only manage to get twenty milligrams.”

            Nezumi pulled his hand away from Shion’s hair, appalled. “Are you serious? Jeez, Shion, you’re out of here in a minute or less. You’ve got to drink more at a time. Take it in the mornings before weigh-ins of the product, they’ll assume for a while that it’s just evaporation, you just have to present it like that, make up some bullshit reason for why so much evaporates at night. They’ll make you spend extra hours in the lab to try and fix the evaporation problem, but it buys you more time.”

            “Did I tell you to tell me this?” Shion asked, blinking quickly.

            Nezumi waved his hand. “Not really, you just talk a lot and it’s hard to tune it all out. Look, you’re going to disappear soon. I’ll see you later, all right? Remember what I said.”

            “How do you know that I’m – Oh, it’s happeni—”

            Nezumi watched Shion disappear. Shion had said it was his fifth time visiting, but Nezumi had long since lost track of the number of times Shion had appeared into his life, only to disappear again.

*

(September; Nezumi 9, Shion 29)

Nezumi was practicing piano in the recreation room when the strange time traveling man appeared for the third time.

            No one else was in the room – the other children left when Nezumi came in, but he paid them no mind. Since the piano had been donated to the orphanage two weeks before, Nezumi had decided to teach himself to play, even if that meant leaving his room.

            The intruder, who insisted again on his second visit that Nezumi call him _Shion,_ seemed to fall out of nowhere onto a beanbag chair, and Nezumi turned at the sigh of the tired cushion to eye his visitor.

            “Oh, it’s you,” Nezumi said, fingers stilling on the keys. He examined the man quickly and realized the guy looked sickly – in a much less healthy condition than Nezumi had seen him the two times previous.

            The man sat up in the beanbag, or at least, he tried to, but the cushion absorbed him easily, and he groaned, a hand running over his face.

            “You know, if a facilitator finds you in here, they’ll think it’s a break-in. You’ll be arrested,” Nezumi pointed out.

            “Can you help me, Nezumi? Can you take me to your room?”

            “Why should I do that?” Nezumi asked. The man kept insisting they were friends, but Nezumi was not yet convinced of any such thing. He’d never had a friend before, and this man wasn’t particularly his first choice of companionship, which he’d never had any need for anyway.

            “Nezumi. I need your help. Please,” the time traveler whispered, catching Nezumi’s gaze, and Nezumi felt his stomach flip at the red eyes, again doused in the feeling that the eyes were familiar, that he’d seen them before – and not somewhere nice, that was for sure.

            Nezumi didn’t know why – it wasn’t like he owed the stranger anything – but he found himself standing up from the piano bench, closing the lid softly over the keys, and stepping towards the man in the beanbag, extending a hand.

            The man took it carefully, his hand big and warm around Nezumi’s, but his grip was loose and weak, and it was up to Nezumi to tighten his fingers before pulling.

            The guy was heavy, but two tugs had him out of the beanbag, and he stumbled before Nezumi caught him around the waist.

            “What’s wrong with you? Are you drunk?”

            “No,” the man said softly, as Nezumi guided him to the door of the recreation room.

            Nezumi peeked out first, and on seeing no one in the hallway, proceeded to pull the stranger into the direction of his room. He didn’t say anything as they walked, keeping quiet so they wouldn’t get caught, although the stranger was breathing really loudly, jeopardizing himself, the idiot.

            Despite the labored breathing, they made it without incident. Safely in his room, Nezumi shut the door and unwound his arm from the time traveler, who fell onto Nezumi’s bed, pulling himself into a seated position against the wall while Nezumi scrutinized him. “Are you sick?”

            “A little,” the man said, and Nezumi stepped back.

            “Something contagious? It wasn’t really smart to bring that into an orphanage, you know.”

            “It’s not contagious. It’s not normal sick,” the man said, taking deep breaths every few words. “It’s from time traveling. I work in a lab where I make the drug that allows me to time travel. But I’ve been tampering with the chemical make-up, and my body isn’t really enjoying this much,” he said weakly, adding a small smile as if his own health was some sort of joke.

            Nezumi didn’t smile back. “Why would you do that?”

            The time traveler rubbed a hand over his face again. His skin looked thin and pulled under his fingertips. “A few reasons. Hey, Nezumi, how old are you? You don’t know me well, do you?” the man asked.

            “I’m almost ten. This is the third time you’ve come here.”

            The stranger seemed upset by this, his eyes creasing. “Oh. I’m sorry. I wish this wasn’t one of your first impressions of me. I’m not usually like this.”

            “As in, on your deathbed?” Nezumi asked.

            “I’m not dying.”

            “You look like it,” Nezumi replied, shrugging. He was trying not to let the red eyes bother him.

            “Nezumi, I’m not going to be here long. An hour at most, I wasn’t able to take much of the drug. Do you mind if I just rest? I know you don’t know me yet, but I promise we’ll get to know each other soon. I’m not sure that today is the best day to continue introducing myself.”

            The guy looked like he was going to pass out. Nezumi shrugged.

            “I guess,” he said, and the time traveler smiled gratefully, a crack of lips that was hardly a smile at all, really.

            He laid back on Nezumi’s bed even though Nezumi had not said he could sleep there, but Nezumi didn’t protest, instead watched the man close his eyes and appear to fall asleep immediately.

            He looked dead. Nezumi waited where he was for a few minutes, then inched forward, stepping carefully to the edge of his bed and reaching out. He hovered his hand an inch from the man’s parted lips, and after a moment, felt the faintest breath of air.

            So he wasn’t dead. Well, he would be soon, whether he wanted to admit it or not, that much was clear.

            Nezumi retracted his hand and stood very still, watching the time traveler sleep faintly across his bed until, some time later, he began to blur at the edges, then disappeared completely.

            After a moment of hesitation, Nezumi reached out over the empty bed and laid his hand across the wrinkles on the sheets that the stranger’s body had left.

            His palm pressed against the smallest echo of warmth, the only proof that the time traveler had ever been there, and even this disappeared after another few minutes.

*


	3. Chapter 3

(December; Nezumi 27, Shion 20)

Shion returned from shopping with a bag of Christmas lights.

            “Look what I found! Of course, I’ve studied your time period in depth since I first visited in order to prepare myself for long stretches of time here, and I read about these lights that you guys hang on trees – right? But I never quite believed it, but here they are! On sale, too!” Shion shouted happily, bounding over to Nezumi and shoving the tangled strings of lights in his face.

            Nezumi had been attempting to scrub the stains of salt from the carpet, dragged in by his boots when he’d walked on the salted pavement outside. He looked up, wiping his bangs from his forehead with the back of his hand, and peered into the bag Shion held out.

            “Yeah, Christmas lights. Not a big deal.”

            “Yes, it is! Wait – Where’s your tree? Every house comes with a tree in December, I’ve seen pictures,” Shion said, looking around as if it could have suddenly appeared in the same manner Shion did.

            Nezumi stared at him. “For a genius, you’re pretty dumb. We have to buy a tree. I never do it.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because trees belong outside. If you have to, hang the lights on the bed or something.”

            “We need a tree!” Shion insisted, and Nezumi sighed and stood up, heading to the kitchen to drop the scrubbing brush in the sink.

            “No, we don’t. Christmas isn’t for another week, you’ll be gone by tomorrow.”

            “We can celebrate Christmas today. And maybe I’ll visit next week,” Shion argued stubbornly, while Nezumi washed his hands.

            He turned and accepted the dishtowel Shion held out.

             “Or maybe you won’t, and I’ll have to get rid of the thing on my own,” Nezumi said, not bitterly because of course Shion didn’t know that in his future and Nezumi’s past, they had gotten a tree, and Shion hadn’t returned as he’d said he would.

            “Come on, Nezumi. Please!”

            Nezumi stopped himself from refusing again and looked at the boy for a long moment. He was still new to this, after all. Didn’t realize disappointments were inevitable, didn’t know how to be careful, not yet, and Nezumi preferred this reckless Shion anyway, this naïve Shion, this Shion that didn’t know of the pain older Shion did.

            At this moment, Nezumi knew how to deal with heartache more than this poor kid did, so he pushed his bangs out of his eyes again, then nodded.

            “Yeah, okay. Let’s get a stupid tree. Hurry up, it’s late in the season, only the shitty ones will be left,” Nezumi said, grabbing the boy’s hand and pulling him out of the kitchen.

            While Nezumi got dressed and pulled on his boots, Shion placed the bag of Christmas lights carefully on the bed before bouncing around, expressing his happiness loudly and ceaselessly, taking breaks in his long-winded ramblings a few times to kiss Nezumi shyly.

            The time traveler was still new at that, Nezumi knew, and he had to grab Shion’s arm, pull him closer, stop him from jumping away so he could kiss him more deeply than those pathetic pecks.

            Shion fell against his chest during the kiss, and Nezumi smiled into his lips.

            “Ready, Your Majesty?” Nezumi asked, pulling away, and Shion looked up at him with heavy eyelids. His fingers were tightly wound in the fabric of Nezumi’s jacket.

            “Maybe we can go after…” he mumbled, and Nezumi just smirked, unwound the kid’s fingers and weaved them through his own fingers instead, pulling Shion away from the bed he was angling towards and to the door.

            The boy was still new to sex, and a bit addicted to it, but Nezumi couldn’t say he minded. He enjoyed teaching him what came so naturally to older Shion.

            But they had a tree to buy. Nezumi expected he would be left alone during Christmas again, but now he knew better than to hope, would not feel any disappointment.

            If he could save Shion some disappointment by getting a stupid tree, then so be it.

            As soon as they left the house, the wind blasted against them, and Nezumi pulled Shion closer to him, shielding the kid with his body as they walked, taking the brunt of the cold for himself.

            He didn’t bother wondering when he’d started trying to protect Shion over himself. Nezumi doubted he’d be able to label the moment. Time was impossible to keep track of, with Shion popping in and out of it, distorting it, playing with it like it was nothing at all.

*

(February; Nezumi 15, Shion 25)

Shion was older than Nezumi had seen him in a while, and Nezumi stared at the man carefully, wondering at the wrinkles that caressed the corners of his eyes.

            They were barely detectable, but Nezumi noticed them. He’d been noticing a lot about Shion, lately, and had a suspicion as to what this meant, but he didn’t know what to do with his suspicion.

            The guy was a time traveler, after all. The idea that tugged on the edges of Nezumi’s mind was stupid, pointless, absurd.

            He thought about it a lot anyway. Dreamt about it too, woke up wary and having to do his own laundry, which was just as well because the facilitators always mixed the kids’ clothes anyway as if they were all the same. Nezumi preferred taking care of his own stuff.

            At this particular moment, Nezumi was pretending to do homework while really watching Shion pore over his textbooks. The man was fascinated by them, a “relic of Nezumi’s time” he’d said.

            Nezumi thought it was lucky Shion didn’t have any textbooks in his own time, and had no idea why he bothered looking at them if he wasn’t forced to.

            Shion glanced up, caught Nezumi’s eye, smiled at him.

            Nezumi stared back. The time traveler was weird looking, that was for sure, but not in a bad way. Nezumi guessed everyone in the future had weird scars and strange eye and hair colors, but in Nezumi’s present, Shion stood out. Nezumi found that it was hard to stop looking at him.

            “What?” Shion asked.

            “Does your scar wrap around your entire body?” Nezumi asked, pointing. In the dreams Nezumi was having increasingly nightly, it did. In his dreams, Nezumi was allowed to touch the scar, all the way around Shion’s body, the skin warm under Nezumi’s cool fingertip while Shion watched him, leaned closer, whispered his name…

            “Oh. _Oh_ ,” Shion said, sitting up and blinking at Nezumi. He did not answer the question, but instead nodded vaguely. “I was wondering when this would happen.”

            Nezumi said nothing. He watched Shion rub the back of his neck.

            “Okay. I guess I need to – Do you need me to explain anything to you? Probably not, I’m not sure how to do this,” Shion trailed off, clearly thinking deeply about something or other.

            Nezumi looked back at his homework. Obviously Shion wasn’t going to be answering his question at all.

            “Nezumi, wait,” Shion said, and Nezumi felt warm fingers tipping up his chin, forcing Nezumi to look back up.

            They were Shion’s fingers. The man was suddenly very close, face inches from Nezumi’s.

            “I’m not sure how to go about this. Normally, when two people are in a relationship, it progresses at the same rate for both people, but with us, clearly that can’t be the case.

            Nezumi hadn’t even noticed Shion coming closer. Instead of fear at the man’s proximity, he only felt comfort.

            It was only Shion, after all.

            Nezumi tried to stop thinking about the warm fingers on his chin, and focused on what Shion was saying. He was always saying something or other, but Nezumi had a feeling this particular conversation might be important.

            The word “relationship” as Shion had used it, Nezumi rationalized, could mean many things.

            But the way Shion was looking at him, he further rationalized, seemed to mean only one thing, the same thing Nezumi had suspected of in his own feelings, the absurd idea, the crazy thought.

            “How about this – Nezumi, I like you. I think you know that, and I think you’re old enough now that we can acknowledge that.”

            In Nezumi’s opinion, Shion thought too much. He didn’t say this, as Shion kept talking.

            “I don’t want to progress too fast for you, and as of right now, our age difference is pretty steep. But if it’s okay with you, I’d like to kiss you,” Shion continued, like the words he was saying were not strange, like people actually spoke like that.

            Maybe they did in the future, but Nezumi, for one, found no romance in Shion’s straightforward bluntness.

            But then, Nezumi wasn’t at that moment particularly interested in romance. He was interested in the warmth of Shion’s fingers, and whether that scar really did wrap around Shion’s entire body, and what else about his dreams were true.

            So Nezumi tilted his chin up further, leaned the smallest bit closer to Shion, who leaned closer too. The feel of Shion’s lips was soft, wetter than Nezumi had expected, hot. He kissed gently, and Nezumi was by now pretty certain that at Shion’s age, he’d kissed Nezumi many times, most likely a lot less gently than this.

            The thought was jarring, and Nezumi leaned back. Did he even have any control over this? Was his future already planned out, just because Shion knew what would happen, and Nezumi didn’t?

            “Nezumi, I’m sorry. Was that – Was that not okay?” Shion was asking, eyes clouded, clearly misinterpreting Nezumi’s reaction as if he’d done something wrong, but Nezumi wasn’t sure who was in the wrong, or if anyone was.

            He’d always liked to think he had some control in his life. He could, if he wanted to, walk out right now, leave Shion in his room. He felt no binds on his body, was aware of no force stopping him from acting as he pleased.

            Whatever Shion had experienced in his past had been Nezumi’s choice in the future. Nezumi realized this with relief, and shook his head at Shion’s expression.

            “You should kiss me again,” he said, and Shion’s relief spread over his lips.

            “I’m leaving soon.”

            “Then you could hurry up,” Nezumi pointed out, unable to comprehend how the guy could waste so much time on unnecessary statements.

            Shion leaned closer and kissed Nezumi again, and Nezumi allowed himself to stop thinking altogether, to simply feel the way the time traveler’s lips seemed to light his entire body on fire, to somehow turn this feeling into a good thing.

*

 (April; Nezumi 12, Shion 26)

Nezumi’s entire body was on fire, especially his back, where it bit into his flesh, tore at his skin, and he wanted to scream but any inhale just resulted in smoke in his lungs.

            He had no voice. He had nothing but pain, nothing but smoke, nothing but fire, nothing but binds around his waist and arms –

            Binds? They were warm, but in a different way than the fire, slippery over his skin, accompanied by a whisper in his ear, and Nezumi realized they weren’t binds, but arms.

            He forced his eyes open, saw at first only smoke, but then red eyes, bright and wide and trained on him.    

            “Nezumi – ”

            Nezumi flinched back. He had never known fire to have eyes. He tried to pry the arms from his body, but they held him tight, tighter than even the flames licking his skin.

            “Nezumi, it’s okay, Nezumi – ”

            Nezumi tried to shout again, but this time when he inhaled more smoke into his lungs, he couldn’t even exhale. He couldn’t breathe at all, was vaguely aware that he was coughing, felt the rip of his throat and the shudders of his body, felt heat branding his back and the arms still around his, tighter, tighter, pulling him, shaking him –

            “Nezumi!”

            Nezumi woke with a start to the same red eyes looming over his and shouted, thrashing, but he was held still by steady arms.

            “You’re awake, it was a nightmare, it’s okay, Nezumi, it’s okay, it was just a nightmare.”

            Nezumi gasped wildly, cool air filling his lungs, and it was a moment before he recognized the man shaking him awake, using cool fingers to lift Nezumi’s tangled hair off his neck where it stuck.

            “Shion?” Nezumi asked, and when the man caught his gaze, it was with the red eyes from his nightmare.

            The same red eyes from his memories that only ever came to him when he slept.

            Nezumi jerked back. “You – ”

            “Shh, Nezumi, go to sleep, it’s okay, just go back to sleep,” Shion was saying. He looked tired and sad, but Nezumi could hardly focus on this.

            He felt his eyes closing, felt the weight of his own tiredness tug at his limbs despite the inklings of a realization that couldn’t quite form correctly, not with Shion’s gentle voice soothing him back to sleep.

            “That’s right, go back to sleep, it’s all okay, I’m here, you’re okay, you’re okay now…”

            In the morning, Shion and any memories of the nightmare had disappeared. Nezumi woke as he did every morning, the only trace of his fitful sleep being the sheets that were tangled around his limbs as they always were when he woke.

*

(June; Nezumi 26, Shion 25)

Nezumi woke with a start, groggy and only vaguely aware of the presence beside him, shaking him.

            “Nezumi, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Nezumi, I’m so sorry – ”

            Nezumi opened his eyes and sat up. Shion hovered over him, grabbing his arm, and it was a second before Nezumi realized the man’s eyes and cheeks were shining.

            “Shion?” Nezumi asked, instantly awake now. He did not remember falling asleep next to the man, which must have meant the time traveler had just appeared. “When are you coming from? What happened?”

            As his initial shock ebbed, Nezumi noted the smell of smoke. It seemed to be coming from Shion, who was sobbing now, into Nezumi’s chest.

            Nezumi wound his arms around the man reflexively.

            “Hey, it’s okay. Shion? Shion, look at me.”

            “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I tried, I really tried, but by the time I got you out – You were fighting me, it wasn’t your fault, of course, you thought I was the reason for – But I couldn’t, I tried to, it was too late, I couldn’t go back in, I couldn’t – ”

            “Shion! Hey! What are you talking about? Are you talking about me? What happened?” Nezumi demanded. He managed to push Shion’s shoulders back enough so he could see Shion’s face. There were dark streaks over it along with the shine of tears, Nezumi realized, and he reached out warily. “Shion…”

            “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Shion hiccupped as Nezumi touched his cheek.

            “Shh, okay, you don’t have to talk about it right now. Come lie down, okay? How long are you here?”

            “I only drank a sip, I just got back from – from your past – Nezumi, I’m so sorry – I had to tell you I was sorry – ”

            “Stop it. Shion, stop. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if this is in my past, there is nothing you need to be sorry for. Okay? Shion?”

            “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I couldn’t save them – ”

            Nezumi froze, retracting his hand from Shion’s cheek. “What? Who? Shion?” Nezumi asked, leaning forward, skin chilled, but then Shion was gone, and Nezumi was left to listen to his own suddenly heavy breathing, amplified by the sudden absence of Shion’s voice.

            He turned and flicked on the new lamp he’d bought for the nightstand, then inspected his fingers, bringing them up to his nose to smell.

            They were stained with black dust and smelled like fire. Soot.

            It occurred to Nezumi for the first time that there was no way he could have survived the fire that killed his family if someone hadn’t pulled him out of the burning house. He’d never thought about it, only knew he’d blacked out from the smoke and pain, woken up later in the hospital alone. He hardly ever thought back to that night, didn’t register it but for a few moments on the occasional morning when he thought he might have dreamt of it, but could never be sure.

            Now he was forced to think about it in the sober moments of full consciousness, as he had never felt more awake. Now he was certain he could not have gotten out of that building alone, would have died with the rest of his family if he had been left alone, but alone was how he’d been found, as if his rescuer had simply disappeared into thin air.

            Nezumi pulled his knees up to his chest, tightened his arms around them. He never thought about the past because that was what it was, that was where it belonged – or so Nezumi had believed until Shion came into his life, took the past and present and future and mixed them, tore off the scabs of memories so that they bled into today and stained tomorrow even before the sun could rise.

            Nezumi pressed his forehead against his knees, breathed deeply, and tried to forget.

*

(May; Nezumi 18, Shion 23)

Nezumi walked out of the orphanage for the last time in his life. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder with the few articles of clothing he owned, and stuffed under it all, a lamp he’d stolen from his nightstand, a keepsake.

            Reminder of the good old days, Nezumi thought with a smirk, and at that moment Shion appeared in front of him.

            “Someone looks happy,” Shion said, smiling back, and Nezumi looked around.

            “We’re in the middle of the street. Someone could have seen you.”

            “I can’t help where I appear. Wait, are you leaving the orphanage? Is today the day?”

            “Very observant,” Nezumi replied, hiking the duffel bag further up his shoulder.

            “That’s so great! I’m so happy I could be here for this! We have to celebrate, should we drop your stuff at the apartment first?”

            Nezumi nodded, and together they walked to the apartment building, Shion offering to take the duffel bag ten minutes into the walk and Nezumi handing it over easily, asking why Shion hadn’t offered earlier.

            At his new apartment, Nezumi unlocked the door and stepped inside. He’d been there twice before – once while looking, the second time after signing the lease. It was small, but Nezumi didn’t mind small.

            It was his.

            “Have you been here before?” Nezumi asked, turning to Shion, who had dropped the duffel bag and spread himself carelessly over Nezumi’s new mattress.

            “Of course. I’ve been here countless times,” Shion said, sitting up and eyeing the bare walls.

            Nezumi didn’t know how long he’d stay here, and didn’t ask because if Shion knew, it was doubtful he’d tell him. His stupid rules about not revealing Nezumi’s future unless he had to.

            But there was something comforting in at least knowing his life in this apartment would be full of the airhead who was bouncing off the bed now, pulling Nezumi eagerly back out the door to celebrate.

            The promise of the time traveler’s presence made the place feel more like home.

*


	4. Chapter 4

(March; Nezumi 17, Shion 21)

“They’re getting suspicious of you. They definitely know you aren’t a prospective parent, you would have adopted me already,” Nezumi commented to Shion as they left the orphanage after Shion signed Nezumi out for an approved day trip.

            Shion grinned at him. “Doesn’t matter. You’re out of here in a year. Are you excited?”

            “Thrilled,” Nezumi replied dryly.

            “Wait, hold on,” Shion said, after they turned a corner, and Nezumi turned just as Shion grabbed his hand and pulled him behind a building.

            The time traveler kissed Nezumi before he could protest, and Nezumi felt himself relax against the brick wall Shion had pushed him against. He kissed back, full-mouthed, opening his lips, pulling Shion closer against him by the hem of his jacket.

            Shion reached a hand up Nezumi’s shirt, and the cool wind slipped up under the lifted fabric, nipped at his exposed skin, contrasted the warmth of Shion’s fingers trickling along his rib cage.

            Nezumi slipped his own thumbs under Shion’s jacket and sweater, rested his hands against Shion’s hips and held him close for another minute or two before pushing him gently away.

            “Careful, Your Majesty, public displays of affection aren’t helping your prospective parent disguise.”

            “That’s why we’re behind a building,” Shion replied, lips wet from Nezumi’s mouth.

            “Is this the surprise you were going on about? There are walls in the orphanage you could have pinned me against without the hassle of signing me out.”

            Shion smiled, too widely, too happily.

            Was it Nezumi, that made the guy so damn happy? Could that be possible?

            “No, the surprise is something else. I just wanted to kiss you. But we should probably go now, if we want to make it to the surprise.”     

            “Maybe I don’t want the surprise. I kind of like this wall. I’ve grown a certain fondness towards it,” Nezumi teased, and Shion laughed, pulled him by the hand, didn’t let go even when Nezumi followed him, straightening his jacket with his free hand.

            “You want the surprise. It’s really good.”

            “Good in Shion’s world, or good for a normal person?”

            “Both,” Shion said, flashing Nezumi another too wide grin, and Nezumi wanted to be wary, but instead let himself relax, let himself be infected with Shion’s easy happiness without protest.

            As they walked to wherever it was Shion was leading them, Shion talked about his mother, whom he had mentioned a few times before. Nezumi knew they were close, best friends, Shion had even said once, and the words had stuck with Nezumi, bothering him for some reason he couldn’t peg until this moment.

            “Doesn’t your mother wonder where you go, when you disappear and come here? I mean, she has to notice, if you’re with her so often,” Nezumi interrupted, and Shion stopped his rambling to glance up at him.

            “She knows.”

            “That you steal the drug from the lab where you work to time travel at your leisure?” Nezumi asked, skeptical.

            “I wouldn’t say it like that,” Shion said, frowning. “She knows I’m trying to figure out a way to bring the cure we developed into the past, and she’s aware that such a thing requires many tweaks and trials.”

            “So you lied to her.”

            “I did not!”

            “You’re not trying to bring anything here. You gave that up years ago.”

            “That’s not true. Why would you think that? Whenever I’m in my present, I’m working on the formula. I come here to see you, of course, but I haven’t forgotten my job,” Shion replied, and Nezumi watched him carefully, the chill of the wind finally managing to creep through his clothing and under his skin.

            “Well, isn’t your answer obvious?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Inject yourself with the cure. Then time travel on back here, and give some blood samples,” Nezumi said. He wondered, vaguely, why he was even suggesting it. Once Shion knew how to transport the cure, there would be no reason for him to continue time traveling.

            “Of course we thought of that, but the problem is that the cure is deadly to anyone who does not actually have the disease. We’ve been trying to fix that too, along with the issues with the time traveling drug.”

            “You’ve been very busy, I see,” Nezumi commented dryly. He slipped his hand free from Shion’s into his own pocket, hunching his shoulders to brace himself against the cold.

            “Is something wrong, Nezumi?” Shion asked, after a moment.

            “Nothing at all.”

            “Nezumi,” Shion said, grabbing Nezumi’s elbow and pulling him to stop walking.

            Nezumi glanced at Shion. “How long until you fix all this stuff?”

            Shion looked at Nezumi for a moment before answering. “I’m not sure. It’s very complicated science.”

            “I’m sure it is.”

            “Why are you angry?”

            “I’m not angry,” Nezumi replied, crossing his arms over his chest.

            “You are. Why?”

            “I’m just wondering when it is you’ll be done with this time travel stuff. Just curious, that’s all. Not angry.”

            Shion blinked. “I’m not – Nezumi, I told you, I’m not just time traveling in order to transport the cure anymore. I haven’t forgotten about that, but it is no longer the only reason I come to the past. I leave my present for you.”

            “I never asked you to do that,” Nezumi snapped.

            “That’s not what I meant! I want to – Nezumi, why are you trying to fight? You have to know that – You’re not just a detour. I love you. I want to be with you.”

            Nezumi said nothing. Shion had never said _I love you_ before, but really, those words hardly meant a thing from him. Shion spouted nonsense without thinking all the time. He hardly ever seemed to think about his words.

            And even if he did mean them, what good was that? Love was hardly a promise. It was a feeling, an emotion, and those came and went.

            Nezumi realized he wasn’t angry with Shion. He was angry with himself for just assuming Shion would be a permanent part of his life. Of course he wouldn’t. One day, Shion would return to his present, and he would not come back. He had a job there, a mother there, a life there.

            “Okay, Shion. Forget I said anything,” Nezumi said, quietly.

            “Nezumi – ”   

            “You said we had to hurry to make it to the surprise, right? Come on, I’m not upset with you, Your Majesty, you know I could hardly be mad at you,” Nezumi said, smiling lightly at Shion, who did not smile back, instead reached out and tucked Nezumi’s bangs behind his ear.

            “I do love you, you know,” Shion said, again, softly. “I will always come back to you.”

            Nezumi clenched his jaw, then forced himself to relax. He nodded, accepting that Shion meant this promise as he spoke it, completely intended to keep it at this moment.

            This moment was enough. With Shion, anything but this moment became too complicated, too tangled, too uncertain.

            “Take me to my surprise, Shion,” Nezumi replied, and Shion looked at him for another moment before nodding.

            “Okay. Let’s go.”

            When Shion took Nezumi’s hand again, Nezumi didn’t pull away, and neither man spoke as they walked at a quicker pace now, Shion pulling Nezumi faster.

            “What’s the rush, Your Majesty?” Nezumi asked, disgruntled, two blocks later.

            “I don’t want to miss the opening act!”

            “Opening – ?” Nezumi didn’t bother finishing his question when they finally stopped walking abruptly, and Nezumi looked up to see the local theater looming before him.

            “Come on!” Shion goaded, and the smile was back as if it had never left as he pulled Nezumi into the building and unearthed two tickets from his pocket to offer to the woman at the podium.

            “Theater two, on your left,” the woman said, ripping the tickets and handing the stubs back to Shion, though Nezumi grabbed them from his fingers a second later.

            _King Lear,_ he read.

            “When did you get these?” Nezumi demanded, as he followed Shion into Theater 2.

            “I bought them this morning before I came to get you. I appeared in your room, so I had to sneak out through your window, then sneak back in so you wouldn’t know I had sneaked out, and then I had to sneak out again so the facilitators wouldn’t know I’d appeared in your room.”

            Nezumi stared at Shion, who grinned at him, smile bright in the dark of the theater.

            “Are you going to disappear in the middle?” Nezumi asked, hating himself for asking it, wishing he could just pretend they were normal for once, but he couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t smile as easily as Shion, he couldn’t act like time was on their side.

            Shion’s smile faltered the smallest bit, but he kept it up anyway. “No, I’m not going to disappear, Nezumi. Not for two more days.”

            Nezumi nodded. “Okay. Good,” he added, offering Shion a small smile in apology that he had asked, that he kept ruining this nice thing Shion had done for him. “Thank you, for my surprise. I love it, Your Majesty.”

            _I love you,_ was what he was supposed to say, but he didn’t.

            Another time, he promised himself, he would tell Shion at another time.

*

(April; Nezumi 17, Shion 22)

At the knock, Nezumi placed his hand over Shion’s lips, waited a moment to ensure his voice wouldn’t be breathless, then called, “Yeah?”

            “You have a visitor,” came the voice of a facilitator under Nezumi’s door.

            None of the doors had locks. Nezumi stared down at Shion pinned to the bed underneath him, his only possible visitor, who was watching him back with wide eyes, a bead of sweat running down his hair and along his cheek, curving towards his ear.

            “Right. I’ll be right out,” Nezumi replied, breath hitching when Shion angled his hips up slightly, tense around him. “Stop that,” Nezumi hissed at Shion under his breath, releasing Shion’s lips.

            “Sorry, I’m right at the edge,” Shion whispered back, so Nezumi replaced his hand and glared at the man.

            “Okay,” the facilitator said, and Nezumi listened to footsteps retreating from the door before relaxing over Shion and exhaling deeply. He let his body fall against Shion’s and released the man’s lips again.

            “Is that you?” Nezumi asked, wiping his bangs from his eyes and propping himself back off Shion’s chest.

            “Your visitor? Probably.”

            “It’s a good thing you didn’t sign in this morning,” Nezumi mused. “If the facilitators saw two of you, that would seriously fuck things up.”

            “I got here before sign in hours,” Shion replied, moving his hips again, but Nezumi reached down and placed a hand over Shion’s waist, pressing it hard against the mattress to still him.

            “Stop that, I have to go sign _you_ in.”

            “Just a minute more – ”

            “During which someone can check to see if I’m coming and walk in on us? Not your best idea, Your Majesty,” Nezumi replied, sitting up and pulling out of Shion, who groaned.

            “This isn’t fair! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had sex with you? Seven months, Nezumi. Seven months!”

            “Yeah, well, I just fucked you three days ago. It’s your own fault for not taking that drug in seven months.”

            “I don’t have an unlimited supply, you know,” Shion grumbled, while Nezumi dressed quickly and pulled his hair into a quick braid in order to tame it.

            He slipped out his door, closing it quickly behind him, and headed to the visitor’s check-in desk, but there was no other Shion in sight.

            Nezumi went up to the window and waited for a facilitator to look up.

            “I was told I had a visitor.”

            “Oh. Yeah, Shion again. After I told you and came back, he had disappeared.”

            Nezumi said nothing. It didn’t make sense, for Shion to drink only enough potion to make him appear for less than a minute – and it made even less sense that he’d bother requesting a visit when he knew he was just going to disappear.

            “This note was on the counter when he left, though, it’s for you,” the facilitator continued, sliding a folded piece of paper towards Nezumi, who took it and walked back to his room.

            It was written on a ripped-off corner of the pink sign-out sheets kept at the visitor’s desk, and Nezumi unfolded it as he let himself back into his room.

            “Where am I?” Shion asked, from his bed, sheets pulled up to his waist.

            Nezumi glanced at him. “You disappeared before I got down there.”

            “That’s strange. Why would I put in a visitor’s request if I was going to disappear? Maybe it was one of my first time travels, I didn’t drink much of the drug when I was younger,” Shion was musing, as Nezumi tuned him out and stared at the unfolded note.

            Written on it was the month, and underneath that were Nezumi’s and Shion’s names, both followed by the number thirty-one.

            “What is that?”

            “You left it before you disappeared. It just says April, then mine and your name and the number thirty-one written after both names.”

            “Thirty-one?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi turned the paper over, inspected it for anything else, but there was nothing.

            “What does that mean? I don’t understand. Are you sure that’s what it says? Maybe you can’t read my handwriting, although it is very neat, but perhaps I was in a rush. Let me see the note,” Shion was saying.

            Nezumi walked towards the bed, sat on the edge of it, and Shion leaned forward, peered over Nezumi’s shoulder, his hair brushing against Nezumi’s cheek.

            “Huh, that’s written more sloppily than my usual handwriting. Why would I leave a note like that?”

            “Aren’t you the one who should know?” Nezumi asked.

            “Hmm, maybe,” Shion hummed, kissing Nezumi’s neck, and Nezumi didn’t pull away, but he was too distracted to continue what the unexpected visit had interrupted.

            He had a bad feeling about the strange note, an even worse feeling about the fact that Shion had disappeared so quickly. Clearly, he wanted Nezumi to make something of this note, or he would not have bothered going through the motions of making a visitor’s request to get Nezumi’s attention and ensure he got the cryptic slip of paper.

            Nezumi folded the note and placed it into his pocket, giving in when the Shion that hadn’t yet disappeared started biting his earlobe.

            He did not know, at that moment, that the note would be forgotten, left in Nezumi’s jean pocket even after he threw it in the laundry, regarded as junk and therefore left in his pocket by the kids who worked the laundry room and were in charge of checking pockets for possible forgotten valuables.

            There was nothing valuable, it seemed, in a small pink slip of paper with a month, two names, and the same number hastily scrawled on it twice, the last digit of the last number more of a stump than a line, as if the person who’d written it had been unable to finish.

*

(July; Nezumi 28, Shion 29)

Nezumi carried Shion to their bed and laid him down, bundling him with blankets that he grabbed from the closet where they stored the extras during summer.

            “How long?” Nezumi asked, when he returned from the kitchen with a mug of tea that he handed to Shion, who cupped it in both hands.

            “Until tonight,” Shion said softly.

            Although it was more time than Nezumi had expected, he was not altogether comforted by the fact.

            It was sick Shion, that had appeared in the cereal aisle while Nezumi was grabbing Frosted Flakes. He’d nearly collapsed against the shelf of Fruit Loops, and Nezumi immediately abandoned his cart and took the man home. He’d seen sick Shion a couple times, knew he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Around these ages the lab was getting more serious, both about the strange depletions in the drug and the fact that the drug still was not working as they’d wanted it.

            Nezumi knew as much that Shion had to tamper more with the formula than he felt comfortable with, to the point where it was no longer as void of side effects as it had been. He was no longer allowed to even take test samples, not until they could get the drug back to the point where it was safe for human consumption, and yet he continued to do so, and Nezumi wished he’d just stop.

            As much as Nezumi wanted to see this man, taking the goddamn drug was clearly killing him. And now he’d taken so much that he was able to stay until the night. Usually, sick Shion only stayed a few moments, an hour tops, just long enough to see if the changes to the drug had been successful.

            “Christ, Shion. Why the fuck did you do that?” Nezumi snapped.

            “I missed you,” Shion said weakly, and Nezumi shook his head.

            He’d just seen Shion a few weeks before, but knew it might have been much longer since Shion had seen him. Still, that didn’t justify this.

            “Unbelievable,” Nezumi muttered, combing his fingers gently through Shion’s hair.

            “Nezumi, can you check my pockets?”

            “What? These aren’t your clothes,” Nezumi said, peeking under the blanket to note that the clothing Shion wore was normal for Nezumi’s century – which meant, of course, that they weren’t what Shion had been wearing when he took the drug in his own present.

            “Just check,” Shion murmured, and Nezumi didn’t want Shion to talk anymore, not with that weak voice, so he did what the man asked.

            He pulled back the blankets and curled his fingers into Shion’s front pocket, finding nothing, moving to the other side and feeling something hard and round.

            He pulled it out, inspected it. It was a penny.

            “Here,” Nezumi said, handing it to Shion, who took it, eyes widening.

            “Look,” Shion murmured, showing the penny to Nezumi, who glanced at it without interest.

            He cared more to look at the man lying in his bed, the bags under his wide eyes, the sick pallor of his skin.

            “Yeah, a penny, I’ve seen a few before,” Nezumi said, brushing Shion’s hand away, but Shion raised it again.

            “The year, look at the year, Nezumi,” Shion said, and Nezumi glanced at him to see the man was smiling – weakly, but smiling nonetheless.

            Nezumi took the penny warily and read the year.

            It definitely wasn’t a year Nezumi ever expected to make it to in his lifetime.

            “I brought it from my present. The new drug is working. I brought a penny.”

            “Holy shit,” Nezumi murmured, turning the penny over in his fingers, inspecting it further. “Damn, Your Majesty, that’s – Shion!”

            Nezumi had glanced up from the penny to see that Shion was fading, not blurring around the edges as he did before he disappeared, but becoming… _transparent_ was the only way Nezumi could think to describe it. He could see the faint outline of the pillow Shion rested against behind his head.

            “What?” Shion whispered.

            “Hold up your hand,” Nezumi instructed, trying to keep his voice level.

            The man dragged his hand up and lifted it, fingers fanned. Both Shion and Nezumi stared at it, Nezumi catching the surprise on Shion’s face through Shion’s palm.

            “Oh.”

            “You need to get back to your present. This isn’t right,” Nezumi said strictly, reaching his hand out in front of Shion’s.

            He didn’t know if he wanted to touch it or not, and his fingers hovered hesitantly before Shion’s.

            “I can’t go back before the drug wears off, you know that,” Shion said, wondrously, turning his hand back and forth in front of his eyes.

            “Shion. Listen to me. You’re not taking this drug again.”

            “It works now. I can transport the cure if we can contain it in something as small as a penny.”

            “No. Someone else can do it,” Nezumi said, dropping his palm without touching Shion’s – he decided he wasn’t ready to know if transparent Shion was just as warm.

            Shion dropped his hand too and looked at Nezumi. “No, they can’t.”

            “Yes – ”

            “No, Nezumi, really. I thought – I never told you? I’m the only one. The drug doesn’t work on anyone else. I added my gene sequence to the formula when it continued to fail, and that’s when it finally worked. I’ve been the only one who could time travel. We were going to create other versions with other people’s gene sequences, but funding is tight, and we needed to figure out how to change the formula in order to transport things from my present more than we needed other people to be able to time travel. I’m the only one who can do it.”

            Nezumi stared, absorbing the new information, then shook his head. “No. Fine, I don’t care, if no one can transport the cure, then so be it. You’re not risking your life.”

            “You don’t understand. In seventy years or so, more than eighty-five percent of the population is killed by the disease that we now have a cure for. If it costs my life to save them, that’s not much of a price to pay.”

            “Yes, it is! You don’t know these people! Shion, why do you even care about them? They’re all dead before you’re born – ”

            “You could be one of them, Nezumi,” Shion said softly.

            “I’ll be on my deathbed by that time anyway! Forget it. Live your own life. Give a crap about your own survival. It’s not up to you to save anyone.”

            “It’s not just anyone. It’s most of humanity. The present where I come from is empty, Nezumi. It’s horrible, it’s cold, there’s no one. I grew up in a civilization trying to rebuild itself. There are more corpses than warm bodies to dispose of them. I can change that.”

            “Listen to me, you won’t survive another trip. Look at yourself, you’re see-through. You’re not doing this. Give me the formula for the cure, write it down, I’ll make sure it’s made, okay? What about that?” Nezumi demanded, hating that Shion shook his head before Nezumi had even finished talking.

            “You don’t have the technology available. It won’t be developed until it’s too late. Nezumi, it’s okay. Don’t worry about me, it’s going to be okay,” Shion said, as if his skin was not translucent, as if Nezumi couldn’t make out the stripes of their fucking bedspread through his arm.

            “Don’t give me that bullshit!” Nezumi yelled, standing up from the bed, glaring down at the sick man fading against it, then pacing so he wouldn’t have to look at him any longer. “Why do you care so much about these people you don’t know? Why is it up to you to save fucking humanity? If it can’t save itself, it doesn’t deserve to survive!”

            Shion looked at Nezumi for a long moment, then spoke softly, so quietly Nezumi was forced to stop pacing and stand closer to the bed to hear. “Years ago, I saved the life of a little boy, and he ended up being the best person I know. You’re right, I know none of the people that will die in your future, but I have faith in them. Just because you need someone to save you doesn’t mean you’re weak. You know that, Nezumi. You know that.”

            Nezumi froze, his breath stuck in his throat.

            He thought about his mother and his father and his baby sister, and he hadn’t thought about them in years, but now he was forced to, and they weren’t weak, they didn’t survive, but they weren’t weak.

            Nezumi thought about himself, and he wasn’t weak, he knew this, but he would not have lived if he hadn’t been pulled out of his burning house by arms like binds, by a man with red eyes.

            Nezumi felt sick. He let himself fall back onto the bed beside Shion.

            How could he tell Shion he had no place to be saving lives when Nezumi owed his own life to this man?

            “Don’t do this,” Nezumi said anyway, not caring if he had no place to say it. Someone had to. Someone had to save Shion, when the man would only think of saving everyone else.

            “It’s going to be okay, Nezumi,” Shion said, raising a hand up, cupping Nezumi’s cheek, but it hardly felt more solid than a soft exhale, hardly felt warmer than a sigh.

            “No. Just because you say it will doesn’t mean shit, Shion. It won’t be okay. Don’t you fucking lie to me. You should have stopped this a long time ago. I should have made you stop this, but then sick Shion would disappear, and you’d reappear young and healthy, and I just – ” Nezumi cut himself off, shaking his head. He’d forget. He’d let himself forget that there was a Shion somewhere in time who was dying in order to spend more time with the Shion who was not, the Shion who was whole and healthy and happy and warm, the Shion who was with Nezumi.

            “Nezumi, can I ask you something? Have you ever seen me older than twenty-nine?”

            Nezumi gritted his teeth, ground them together. He shook his head because he didn’t trust himself to answer without yelling at the man who looked too frail to be yelled at.

            “Okay. I have to tell you something. It’s only fair that you know, I don’t want you to be waiting. You’re older now, right? Twenty-nine?”

            “I’m twenty-eight,” Nezumi said, voice tight.

            Shion nodded. Nezumi tried to look at him, tried to keep his focus on the time traveler and not the pillow behind him, not the bed he laid on, all of which were visible behind his transparent skin, but it was difficult to hold Shion’s gaze when it kept slipping away.

            “I have never seen you older than twenty-nine, Nezumi. You’ll see me a few more times, I’m in my younger twenties, I think. And that will be it. I want you to know that. You told me once, when we had that big fight – Do you remember? You told me that it didn’t make sense for you to wait for me if you didn’t know when I was coming back. Remember, Nezumi?” Shion was saying, still talking, but Nezumi was hardly listening anymore, was still reeling from Shion’s first words.

            If Shion couldn’t time travel anymore, then fine. Nezumi could live with that because at least the younger Shion had time traveled, at least Nezumi could still receive visits that were already made.

            But Shion saying he had never seen Nezumi older than twenty-nine in his past meant Nezumi wouldn’t be seeing Shion in his future.

            “Why?” Nezumi asked, interrupting Shion while he was saying something else, talking as if anything else he could say could matter as much.

            “What?” Shion asked, eyes creased in concern, and Nezumi wondered vaguely what his own expression was.

            “Why didn’t you visit me when I was older than twenty-nine? Why was there a cut-off? I don’t understand – Why, Shion?” Nezumi demanded, as if knowing the answer could make a difference, could change the past, could fix the future.

            Shion shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, Nezumi, I always wondered, sometimes I worried – I worried it meant something had happened to you – But now I think it may be because even past versions of myself can’t exist when I don’t – ”

            “So what? You’ve already resigned yourself to your death? That’s it?” Nezumi snapped.

            “Nezumi – ”

            “And this was your grand plan? You took a shitload of the drug that’s killing you so you could sit me down for a few hours and explain this to me in a rational way? So you could lie here and spell out for me that you’re done, we’re done, that’s it, and I’m supposed to nod, right, that’s my role here, am I right, Shion?”

            “Please – ”

            “Or do you want me to go further? Do you want me to shake your hand, slap you on the back, tell you fucking congratulations for finally perfecting that deadly drug of yours so you can transport a cure, which you’re now going to do on a suicide mission that I should be proud of you for, shouldn’t I? I should thank you for saving humanity, for saving a bunch of people I don’t know, that I don’t give a shit about, because they’re more important than you, aren’t they? The lives of all those other people are supposed to matter more to me than yours, is that what you want me to think? Is that what you’re asking me to feel? Dammit, Shion, you’re fucking stupid sometimes but this really takes the – ” Nezumi inhaled, running out of breath, prepared to keep yelling because he wasn’t nearly done, he didn’t feel one goddamn bit better, but then he noticed that Shion’s transparent cheeks were split by snakes of water.

            Nezumi held his inhale, then let it out slowly, a heavy stream of air.

            “You can keep going. I know you’re frustrated, I know you’re mad – I am too. You can keep yelling at me. I don’t mind,” Shion said, quietly, and Nezumi blinked quickly, hated the burning of his own eyes.

            “I don’t want to yell at you.”

            Shion said nothing. He wiped his hands over his cheeks.

            “I want you to keep a promise you made to me. A long time ago, and I didn’t believe you at the time, but for some reason I always remembered it. You promised you’d always come back to me. Prove it. Prove it, Your Majesty.”

            “I wish I could, Nezumi. Your present is my present. I don’t care about time anymore, you are where I belong,” Shion said, and Nezumi stared at his time traveler, couldn’t remember how they’d gotten to this place, how every appearance over all of those years had brought them to this moment, when none of it mattered.

            He’d never said it, Nezumi realized.

            Nezumi had never told the time traveler he loved him. Nezumi always thought there would be another visit, another day, another time in which he could tell the man, so he’d waited, he’d waited until the right moment.

            Now was not the right moment. Now was the wrong moment, the worst moment, and all Nezumi felt was ripped open when loving Shion usually kept him whole.

            So Nezumi still didn’t say it. He cupped his hand over Shion’s cheek, ignored the fact that it wasn’t as solid, wasn’t as warm as it was supposed to be, and he leaned forward, kissed the man gently.

            He hardly remembered their first kiss. Shion had been older, and Nezumi had just hit puberty, had just realized that he felt something more for the strange time traveler. Shion’s first kiss had been even less eventful, hardly a moment at all, as Nezumi hadn’t known the Shion that appeared that day had never been kissed before.

            But this appeared to be both of their last kisses. Even though there were a few young Shions still to visit Nezumi in the next year, Nezumi doubted he’d be able to kiss them. Finally, an event they shared. A memory they would store equally, of the same moment, the same place in time.

            What a horrible memory, it was. There was nothing worse, Nezumi thought, than a last kiss, and he pulled away from Shion, raised his fingers to wipe the man’s cheeks because it was more natural a gesture than wiping his own.

            “What do you want to do with our last hours, Your Majesty?” Nezumi asked gently.

            He could fight the man, but it wouldn’t matter. The time traveler had always been ridiculously stubborn.

            Besides, Shion was looking even wearier, sinking deeper into the bed.

            “I just want to be with you, Nezumi,” Shion whispered, so Nezumi nodded, stood up and walked around the bed to slip under the piles of blankets on the other side of Shion, to press his body against the time traveler’s.

            It was a hot day in July, but Nezumi only pressed himself closer. He laid beside his time traveler, pressed his lips to his time traveler’s hair, held his time traveler’s hand and listened to their breaths fall in synch with each other.

            They laid together and tried to hear the others’ hearts beating, convincing themselves they could, unsure if they were only listening to their own.

            When Shion disappeared, Nezumi still did not move, nor open his eyes. If he laid very still, he was certain he could still feel the time traveler beside him, as if the man had reappeared, found some way to keep his promise, found some way to turn back time.

*


	5. Chapter 5

(September; Nezumi 28, Shion 23)

Nezumi knew, from what Shion had said, that he would see Shion again. He knew he had to prepare himself because the Shion he saw would be younger, naïve, not know that their intertwining presences had an expiration date.

            Nezumi thought about telling the truth to whatever young Shion happened to visit him, but he dashed the thought almost immediately. He didn’t want to lie to Shion, but he didn’t want to ruin Shion’s past either.

            Nezumi had only to thank that he was a trained actor. He masked his somber expression in the mirror a few times, to prove to himself that he could. He carried on normal conversations with his coworkers to show himself that it was possible. He once forced himself to laugh while eating dinner alone, but the sound was so empty and hollow that he silenced himself immediately.

            He waited for Shion to appear.

            When Shion did appear, Nezumi was not practicing his smile in the mirror, nor laughing alone. He was playing piano, a new song he was writing, something he found himself playing without much pause since knowing the truth about the future.

            “Wow, that’s beautiful,” Shion said, when Nezumi finally stopped, and Nezumi jumped, hitting his knee on the bottom of the piano.

            “Fuck,” Nezumi cursed, rubbing his knee and looking up at the time traveler standing behind him.

            “I don’t think I ever scared you before. I didn’t think it could be done,” Shion said, with a grin.

            Nezumi stared, wondering how Shion could grin so easily knowing what would happen – he was never nearly as good an actor as Nezumi was – but then he remembered that this Shion did not know, this Shion was young, this Shion was happy.

            “How long were you standing there?” Nezumi asked.

            “Fifteen, twenty minutes,” Shion said, shrugging, as if time meant nothing to him. “I liked listening. Did you write that yourself?”

            “Yeah,” Nezumi murmured, getting up and heading to the kitchen.

            He didn’t want Shion looking at him too long. He was certain the man would be able to tell something was wrong despite his refined acting skills.

            “You know what I think you should do?” Shion was asking, tailing Nezumi. “I think you should give it to me.”

            Nezumi glanced around his shoulder at the kid. He looked so damn happy Nezumi found it hard not to stare.

            “What?”

            “That song you wrote. You should give your song to me.”

            “What does that even mean?”

            “Dedicate it to me. Think about me every time you play it. That sort of thing,” Shion said, grinning even wider.

            Nezumi had never thought he’d cherish every word of nonsense the kid spoke, but here he was, drinking it all in, knowing he’d have none of it soon.

            “Did this thought actually make sense in your head, or did you know how stupid it was before you verbalized it?” Nezumi asked, knowing his role, playing it as well as he could.

            “Well, you owe me something.”

            “For what?”

            “It’s my birthday!” Shion exclaimed, and it was clear the man had been sitting on that exclamation since he’d appeared beside Nezumi. Nezumi was surprised he’d made it so long before pointing it out.

            Nezumi was completely aware that it was Shion’s birthday. He decided not to let the time traveler know that.

            “Is it?” he mused, and Shion nodded.

            “I’d like that song as my present.”

            “You can’t have it.”

            “Why not?”

            “Music is not something I own, nor is it something I can give away.”

            “Okay, we can share it,” Shion replied, and Nezumi raised an eyebrow.

            “I don’t think you’re grasping the point, Your Majesty.”

            “Doesn’t matter, you can’t argue with me on my birthday! I’ve been wanting to spend a birthday with you forever, by the way. I’m so happy this worked out. Can we bake a cake? Please, Nezumi?”

            Nezumi felt vaguely as though he was breaking, and the time traveler wanted to bake a cake.

            Nezumi nodded. “Of course, Your Majesty, your wish is my command. We’ll have to get ingredients though, I’ve got nothing here, unfortunately.”

            Shion turned away and peered into the refrigerator. “You really need to learn to keep your kitchen stocked, you know,” he said, not yet unearthing his head from the fridge.

            “Hm, well. One day. Come on, let’s go. Do we still have time?”

            “Yep! Two days, I think,” Shion replied cheerfully. “I’m thinking vanilla with chocolate frosting. And – what are those things called? We don’t have them in my present, but I think they were – Sprittles!”

            “Sprinkles?” Nezumi asked, holding the front door open for Shion before closing it behind them.

            “Yes! I’ve been dying to try them.”

            “I don’t blame you. They give you super powers, you know,” Nezumi said, squeezing Shion’s hand gently when the time traveler reached out to weave their fingers together.

            “Seriously?” Shion demanded.

            “Sure. Super strength, flying, invisibility, the normal stuff, but also weird things. The ability to always be able to tell how many marbles are in a jar. The ability to have a three-hour climax – that’s a crowd favorite, as you’d imagine. The ability to plant a nickel and grow an actual money tree if you pee on the dirt.”

            “You’re lying, aren’t you?” Shion asked, laughing, and Nezumi turned to smirk at him.

            “Very observant, Your Majesty. Nothing gets past you.”

            “The marble thing would be cool, though,” Shion mused.

            “ _That’s_ what you’d want?” Nezumi asked, shaking his head in wonder.

            “Let me guess, you’d want the money tree.”

            “Nah, it’d probably just produce pennies. And I don’t need the three-hour climax what with you at my service,” Nezumi said, turning to peek at Shion’s blush before continuing, “so I think I’d go with…time travel.”

            “Oh, they can do that too, can they?”

            “Of course. You’re not the only genius who could think that shit up. The sprinkles factory is very ahead of its time.”

            “What if you and I are time traveling at the same time? We’d miss each other. I could be in the past looking for you, and you could be in the future looking for me.”

            “Who says I’d go looking for you?” Nezumi demanded, tightening his hand around Shion’s to pull him back from walking into traffic. “Careful, Your Majesty.”       

            “You wouldn’t time travel to me? Oh, let me guess, you’d go back to Shakespeare’s time.”

            “I wouldn’t go into your time because I don’t think you’d be there. Not because you’re looking for me, but because I’m onto you. I know your secret, Shion.”

            “What secret?” Shion asked, and they crossed the street, Shion pulling them towards the grocery store and letting go of Nezumi’s hand in order to grab a cart and practically run with it into the store.

            “You’re not a time traveler. You’re just a stalker,” Nezumi replied, catching up and holding the side of the cart to steer it while Shion pushed without paying attention, nearly missing the baking aisle.

            “Oh, is that right? How do you explain the varying ages?” Shion countered before running over to the sprinkles and exclaiming over them, throwing several containers into the cart.

            “Plastic surgery. Tricks of the light. Make-up. You’re not as sly as you think, Your Majesty,” Nezumi replied, picking out the packs of sprinkles and replacing them back on the shelf. “You can pick one.”

            “Two,” Shion countered.

            “One.”

            “It’s my birthday!” Shion complained, butting his head against Nezumi’s shoulder like a child.

            “I already gave you a song. How much do you want?”

            “Wait, really?” Shion asked, suddenly serious, looking up at Nezumi, who blinked back.

            “Sure,” he said, peering at the wide eyes and the smile that grew slowly and widely.

            “Thank you, Nezumi. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” Shion said, saying the words so intently Nezumi could practically feel them pressed against his sleeve.

            Nezumi watched the guy warily. “Thank you,” he said, uncertainly, not sure what to do with Shion’s heartfelt expression.

            Shion smiled wider, as if it was possible without splitting his face in half. “I like you a lot, you know. More than I should, probably,” Shion said happily, out of nowhere, like the words meant nothing at all.

            Nezumi swallowed. _And_ _I love you, Shion._ “Hm. Well, it’s a good thing I’m so humble, or I might let a thing like that get to my head,” he managed, keeping his voice even, and Shion laughed, turned back to the ingredients.

            “Sure, Nezumi. Wait, what’s better, double chocolate icing or chocolatey chocolate?” Shion asked, as Nezumi breathed a sigh of relief.

            For a moment, he’d thought he’d say the words, but it wasn’t time, not yet, not yet.

*

(November; Nezumi 28, Shion 20)

Nezumi laughed and tightened his arms around Shion’s waist to pull him back to bed.

            “Stop! It’s embarrassing!” Shion protested, squirming against Nezumi’s chest, but Nezumi didn’t loosen his hold.

            “I beg to differ, Your Majesty, this may be my favorite thing about you.”

            Shion shifted in Nezumi’s arms so that he faced Nezumi and buried his face in Nezumi’s chest, making a small sound that Nezumi assumed was a cross between a laugh and a groan.

            “Everyone has embarrassing stories about their youth. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. It’ll be our secret,” Nezumi said, loosening his arms from Shion’s waist and letting his hands drift up the kid’s shirt.

            Shion unearthed his face from Nezumi’s chest and peeked at him, cheeks still slightly flushed. “What’s an embarrassing story from your childhood?”

            “Hm, let’s see,” Nezumi murmured, rubbing his thumbs in circles over Shion’s warm skin.

            The kid repositioned himself so he was straddling Nezumi and rubbed his hips gently over Nezumi’s.

            “Once when I was younger, this strange man broke into my room, and I threatened to kill him.”

            “Really?” Shion asked, looking surprised and freezing over Nezumi, and Nezumi realized he was too young to remember – hadn’t even made the memory yet.

            “Yeah. He was pretty cute, actually.”

            “The robber?”

            “He wasn’t a robber. He was a time traveler,” Nezumi murmured, lifting his lips to Shion’s neck, right where his knife had been years ago – or years in the future, in Shion’s time.

            “You threatened to kill me?”

            “I was a cautious child.”

            “Wow. That’s not embarrassing though. You cheated.”

            “Maybe I don’t have any embarrassing stories. Let’s play a different game,” Nezumi whispered, against Shion’s collarbone now, and Shion moaned gently.

            “Okay,” Shion whispered, leaning back and catching Nezumi’s eye.

            Nezumi watched the boy carefully. He knew everything about Shion. Knew every feature of the boy’s face, knew every crease that would develop, knew every emotion it could show. But the Shion that seemed most his was this Shion, young Shion, happy Shion.

            Shion leaned forward, and Nezumi was about to kiss him before the sudden squeeze of his chest had him leaning back.

            “Wait,” he said, and Shion froze.

            “What?”

            “I can’t – I can’t kiss you,” Nezumi admitted.

            He couldn’t do another last kiss. The last time Shion had visited, Nezumi had claimed to be sick, catching a sudden cold as soon as Shion got in bed and refusing to spread it to Shion.

            It was too late to pretend now. Nezumi took a deep breath, held it, waited for the boy’s reaction.

            Shion was nothing but confused, blinking at him, a small crease appearing between his eyes, and Nezumi retracted one hand from under the boy’s shirt to smooth the crease with his fingertip.

            He trickled his fingers down and rubbed his thumb along the kid’s jawline.

            “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

            “Why can’t you kiss me?” Shion asked.

            Nezumi could lie, but he didn’t want to. He clenched his jaw, relaxed. “I can’t tell you.”

            Shion watched him for a moment. He was a young Shion. He was still tentative around Nezumi. Nezumi doubted the kid would question him the way older Shion would.

            “It’s a secret,” Shion said.

            Nezumi nodded. “Yeah, a secret.”

            “Can I tell you a secret?” Shion asked, catching Nezumi by surprise.

            He nodded again.

            “I haven’t had sex with you yet,” Shion said.

            “Ah.” This was somewhat surprising. Nezumi had figured it had been Shion’s first time long ago, that the man had been too embarrassed to point it out.

            “I want to have sex with you now,” Shion continued, and Nezumi exhaled slowly. “But if you can’t do that either, that’s okay.”

            Nezumi inspected the kid. “I could…but I wouldn’t be able to kiss you. I don’t know if you want it to be like that,” he said slowly, trying to wrap his head around the kid’s brain – he could never understand what his time traveler was thinking, could never grasp what went on in that head of his.

            “I’ve visited you a handful of times by now. I like you more every time I see you. But today, there’s something different about you. I don’t know what it is, and I can’t figure it out. Maybe it’s because you’re the oldest I’ve ever seen, but…you look at me differently than you’ve ever looked at me. You make me feel – ”

            “Shion,” Nezumi interrupted. He didn’t want to know how he made Shion feel – and he knew Shion would tell him without abandon, the kid always said everything he thought of. Nezumi’s eyes were burning, and he needed a distraction, he couldn’t let him breaking down be one of the first memories Shion had of him.

            “Yeah?”

            “We can have sex. I can’t kiss you, but we can have sex.”

            Shion breathed deeply, and Nezumi watched him breathe, the way his chest moved, the way his parted lips opened slightly on the inhale, closed marginally on the exhale.

            He bit his lip after his breath, smiled slightly even so. “Okay.”

            “Are you nervous?” Nezumi asked, truly curious. He had not been nervous the first time he had sex with Shion. He had been desperate. Hungry.

            “I don’t think so. I think you’ll take care of me,” Shion replied, and Nezumi looked away from him.

            He couldn’t take care of Shion. He couldn’t save him.

            But Shion didn’t know that yet. Shion was young and whole and happy and his, and Nezumi would not convince him otherwise, would not take away from him what time would steal too soon.

            “I will, Your Majesty. I promise.”

*

(March; Nezumi 29, Shion 25)

Nezumi was practicing the lines for “Death of a Salesman” aloud when he was interrupted by a voice on his bed.

            “I was going to interrupt by saying the next line, but I’ve never heard this play before, so I didn’t know any of the lines,” Shion said, and Nezumi spun around, the relief of seeing the time traveler sitting calmly on the edge of his bed nearly dizzying.

            He leaned against the opposite wall, clutched his playbook tight, tried not to let the time traveler notice that his knees had gone weak.

            “I would have been impressed,” Nezumi managed, his voice breathy.

            “Are you okay?” Shion asked, eyebrows creasing, and Nezumi shook his head, then nodded.

            “Oh, yeah, fine, just sick,” he murmured, thinking he wouldn’t be able to pull off another simple _I can’t kiss you_ with this Shion.

            He was older, Nezumi could tell. Might not let it slide so easily.

            “You, admitting you’re sick? Very suspicious, Nezumi. And you didn’t sound sick when you were practicing your lines,” Shion observed, standing up from the bed and walking over to Nezumi, who glared at him.

            “Well, I am.”

            Shion stopped walking less than a foot away from him. Nezumi pressed himself against the wall and reminded himself to breathe.

            “Are you okay?” Shion asked, after a minute.

            Nezumi narrowed his eyes. “I’m sick, remember?” he asked.

            Shion reached out a hand, tucked Nezumi’s bangs behind an ear, dropped his warm fingers as Nezumi exhaled.

            “Okay,” he said softly, and Nezumi didn’t know if the man believed him or not. “Should I make you soup?”

            Nezumi shook his head. He wanted the man to touch him again. “I’m not hungry.”

            “Do you want to shower? That sometimes makes me feel better. I can wash your hair, if you’d like.”

            Nezumi was so hungry for Shion that the shower would no doubt lead to sex, and he didn’t know if he could do sex without kissing again. The damn man’s lips were too tempting. He shook his head again. “I just showered.”

            “A nap, then?” Shion proposed, peering up at Nezumi, who wondered if Shion noticed the bags under his eyes.

            “I’m not tired,” Nezumi whispered, even though he was. He hadn’t slept a full night in months. He’d started having a different kind of nightmare, one that he couldn’t forget even after he woke, one that would linger with him and keep him awake even until the next night until fatigue pulled him under, resuming the cycle.

            “What do you want to do, then? I want to make you feel better. How can I do that, Nezumi?” Shion asked, watching Nezumi carefully.

            Nezumi didn’t know what to say. He had wanted to see Shion again so badly, but now that the man was there, Nezumi only wished he would disappear.

            To look at him ached. To hear his voice would surely ruin him.

            But to touch him – Nezumi wanted to touch him so goddamn much. To feel his warmth. To never let him ago.

            “Dance with me, Your Majesty,” Nezumi murmured, and he was certain Shion would refuse, demand to know why Nezumi was acting strangely, but the time traveler only nodded, placed a hand on Nezumi’s shoulder, held the other up for Nezumi to take.

            “Will you sing for us?” Shion asked gently, and Nezumi wrapped his arm around Shion’s waist, gripped Shion’s hand, pulled the man close and ducked his face against the side of Shion’s so the time traveler could not see that Nezumi’s eyes were wet.

            “Okay,” Nezumi whispered, the highest he would allow his voice to rise, and Shion stepped back as Nezumi stepped forward, away from the wall.

            He held Shion tighter, so that their torsos pressed together. He gripped the back of Shion’s shirt hard, wrinkled the fabric under his fingers. He wanted to dig his nails into the man’s skin, remind himself that Shion was real, that Shion was solid, but he stopped himself.

            He waited until he’d blinked away the burning from his eyes, and then he began to sing.

            He didn’t sing words. Just syllables of voice, just sounds of notes. He sang the song that he had given to Shion for his birthday – which birthday it was, Nezumi didn’t even know, had forgotten to ask.

            He didn’t know if this Shion was older or younger, would know the song or not. He couldn’t remember, he couldn’t keep track of the Shions any longer, there were so many – but there was only one, really, and he was in Nezumi’s arms, stepping carefully, resting his cheek on Nezumi’s shoulder, hair brushing against Nezumi’s neck.

            Nezumi continued to sing. He couldn’t remember the song exactly as he’d played it the first time Shion heard it, so he made notes up, sang what felt right, hoped Shion would still think it was beautiful.

            He did not realize he was singing softer and softer until he had ceased singing completely. Until he was only breathing, and then he was sobbing, he wasn’t guiding Shion’s feet, he was standing still, just holding Shion closer, pressing his face against Shion’s shoulder, feeling the fabric soak up the heat of his eyes.

            He felt Shion’s hand in his hair. He felt Shion’s voice in his ear.

            “Nezumi, Nezumi, tell me what’s wrong, tell me,” Shion was whispering, and Nezumi held him tighter, thought his fingernails might have been digging through fabric and into Shion’s skin now, didn’t know how to stop hurting this man, didn’t want to stop anyway.

            He had nothing to say to Shion, so he kept crying. It felt good. He hadn’t let himself cry since knowing there would come a point when the time traveler would not be returning.

            Instead, he’d smiled in the mirror so that Shion wouldn’t know. Instead, he’d tried to keep himself whole so that Shion wouldn’t worry.

            But he needed Shion. Nezumi had always thought it was just want, just desire, nothing so potent as need, so dramatic as need – but it was.

            Nezumi needed this man, would not be able to get through this without this man, and so he cried while the time traveler was there to soak his tears with the shoulder of his t-shirt.

            By the time Nezumi was able to stop, Shion had stopped whispering in his ear, had stopped asking him what was wrong. Instead, he stroked Nezumi’s back gently, did not pull away when Nezumi dug his nails in harder, did not move as Nezumi soaked his shirt.

            Nezumi felt empty and tired, and pulled away from Shion when his eyes had dried, when his throat was sore. Shion cupped his cheek, wiped his thumb under Nezumi’s eyelashes.

            “If we don’t talk about it now, I don’t know if we ever will again. I don’t know if we’ll ever catch each other in the right moments of time,” Shion said softly, and Nezumi nodded, took a large breath, felt it hitch on his exhale, took another breath, exhaled more slowly this time, a steady stream of air.

            He swallowed, and it hurt. He wiped the back of his hands over his cheeks.

            “I know that,” Nezumi said. His voice was scratchy and strange in his ears.

            He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to sleep – not to dream, not to have nightmares, just to sleep, to wake with the time traveler beside him, not alone and shouting from another nightmare.

            Shion looked at him for another moment, then nodded. “Okay, Nezumi. That’s okay.”

            “I want to sleep,” Nezumi said.

            “Okay,” Shion said again. He stood still for another second, then took Nezumi’s hand, pulled him to their bed, climbed on first before pulling Nezumi onto the mattress beside him.

            He hugged Nezumi to his chest, and Nezumi thought he could feel the time traveler’s heart beating against his back. He rested his cheek against the pillow and closed his eyes.

            “Will you be here when I wake?” he asked the man behind him, who pressed his knees against the backs of Nezumi’s.

            “I don’t think so,” Shion whispered.

            Nezumi felt his chest constrict, breathed in and out a few times to calm himself. “Wake me up before you go.”

            “Nezumi – ”

            “Shion, I need you to do this.”

            Another pause, and Nezumi almost fell asleep. He was so goddamn tired.

            “Okay. I’ll wake you,” Shion whispered.

            Nezumi let unconsciousness pull him. He did not dream. He did not have a nightmare.

            He woke to gentle fingers tucking his hair behind his ears.

            “Nezumi. Nezumi, I’m leaving.”

            Nezumi opened his eyes. Dregs of unconsciousness lingered.

            _I love you,_ he wanted to say, and instructed his lips to open as he blinked at the red eyes looming over his, so familiar, but of course they were – they belonged to his time traveler, they belonged to the man that had saved him.

            “I’ll see you later, Nezumi,” Shion was saying.

            He was blurring at the edges, and Nezumi didn’t know if it was because he was falling asleep again or because the man was leaving.

            Both reasons shocked Nezumi fully awake. He sat up, stuck his hand out, was aware he still hadn’t said it, but his throat was thick and still sore and he didn’t know how to get it out.

            He grabbed Shion’s sleeve instead, held it tight. “Not yet,” he managed, not the right words, definitely not the right words.

            “Don’t be scared,” Shion said, and Nezumi blinked, felt his fingers unravel from Shion’s sleeve before the man was gone.

            The first time he’d met Shion, he’d known he wasn’t scared of him. He’d thought Shion insane for even suggesting it. He’d thought the idea absurd.

            But now, Nezumi realized, he was scared. For Shion to tell him not to be was the absurd thing.

            How could he not be?

            How could he not be terrified of the loneliness that was coming?

*

(April; Nezumi 29, Shion 21)

They laid on their backs in the grass and pointed out clouds, giving them names, giving them stories.

            Shion fell asleep, and Nezumi kissed him lightly, a brief shadow of lips.

            He figured it didn’t count, if Shion wasn’t awake.

            He figured it didn’t count, if Nezumi himself didn’t know if he was dreaming or not.

            He figured it didn’t count, if Shion disappeared just as their lips touched.

*


	6. Chapter 6

(September; Nezumi 29)

On Shion’s birthday, Nezumi distracted himself by cleaning out his drawers.

            He placed the few items Shion owned in a box, opened drawers he hadn’t opened in years, wanted to find everything and get it out.

            In the back of a bottom drawer, Nezumi pulled out a pile of his clothes from the orphanage. He was throwing them in the box along with Shion’s stuff to get rid of, but he paused on a pair of jeans to empty the pockets, checking more out of habit than the thought that he’d find anything valuable – he’d never owned many valuable things.

            In the front pocket was a scrap of something soft, and Nezumi pulled it out, inspected a faded pink piece of paper that appeared to have been through the washer several times. Nezumi flattened it out, thought the faint scribbles on it might have been writing, at some point, but couldn’t make out any of what was supposedly written.

            As he held it, however, Nezumi felt a strange feeling of warmth, but the feeling was not welcome, had no place here, and Nezumi quickly stuffed the piece of paper back into his jeans pocket and threw the jeans in the box.

            Hope was not something to be kept.

*

(December; Nezumi 30)

Nezumi bought a tree the day the tree farm started selling, purchasing the biggest one they had.

            He strung the lights Shion had bought on sale and showed Nezumi while grinning too widely, acting as if they were something amazing.

            He decorated carefully, taking his time the way Shion had, twisting all the bulbs that had gone out until they shined, making sure no branch looked empty.

            He sang Christmas songs under his breath while he decorated.

            He tried.

*

(February; Nezumi 13, Shion 26)

“No, that’s cosine,” Nezumi objected, pointing at the triangle.

            “That’s sine, Nezumi, the given side is opposite, not adjacent. See?”

            “This is stupid, why do I even need to know this anyway?” Nezumi groaned, falling back against Shion’s shoulder.

            Shion sat cross-legged against the bed, and Nezumi sat on his lap, both looking down at Nezumi’s math workbook which laid open on the floor in front of them.

            For someone who was supposed to be a genius, Nezumi had realized Shion was an awful tutor. He understood everything, but could not teach it in a way Nezumi cared to pay attention to.

            “Want to know something about the future?” Shion asked, and Nezumi glanced around his shoulder at him.

            “Yes,” he replied immediately. He’d been trying to get the time traveler to tell him any bit of information for years.

            “One day, trigonometry will be very important to you,” Shion said, and Nezumi rolled his eyes and looked back at his workbook.

            “You’re lying.”

            “I’m not.”

            “How is it important?”

            “I can’t tell you.”

            “So you’re lying.”

            “That’s a possibility, but it’s also possible that I’m telling the truth. Don’t you want to be ready for that day?”       

            Nezumi said nothing. He didn’t think Shion was telling the truth, but even so, he found himself reaching for his calculator, trying out the problem again – this time with sine functions – and attempting to pay more attention to Shion’s patient teachings.

             After they finished the assigned homework, Shion wanted to do even more practice problems, and Nezumi refused wholeheartedly, hopping off Shion’s lap and stretching.

            “Tell me one more thing about the future,” he said, and Shion looked up at him.

            “I can’t do that.”

            “Just one thing.”

            “Maybe. What do you want to know?” Shion asked, and Nezumi sat back down, this time beside the man.

            “You’re in it, right? You don’t just stop visiting one day, do you?” Nezumi asked quietly. It’d been something he’d been wondering recently, something that kept him up at night, though he wasn’t sure why he even cared that much.

            It’s not like Shion was even his friend. He didn’t know what Shion was, really. Just his time traveler, he supposed.

            Shion smiled at Nezumi gently. “Yeah, I’m in it.”

            “For my entire life?”

            Shion hesitated for a second, and Nezumi saw the flash of doubt in his red eyes, but then he was nodding. “For both of our entire lives,” he agreed.

            Maybe he was lying again, but even so, Nezumi found himself feeling lighter, smiling slightly and turning his face to hide his relief from Shion.

*

(April; Nezumi 31, Shion 31)

The drizzle only lasted a minute, a passing of clouds that hardly shed a mist over Nezumi’s skin.

            He did not move from where he stood against the side of his house. His house was currently full of strangers, so Nezumi was left to stare at the sky and wait for the open house his realtor set up to finish.         

            He was watching the thick crowd of clouds drift slowly away when Shion appeared in front of him.

            “Nezumi.”

            Nezumi didn’t say anything. He stared. He tried to think. This had to be a younger Shion, never mind that he looked older, never mind that Shion insisted he never visited Nezumi older than twenty-nine, never mind, never mind, never mind – Nezumi couldn’t breathe.

            “Nezumi, I will explain everything. I will stay with you forever. I just need you to tell me two things. What month is it, and how old are you?”

            Nezumi had to say something. This was a younger Shion – it had to be, it was the only explanation – and Nezumi couldn’t let this Shion know anything was wrong. “How old are you?” Nezumi asked, a whisper, hardly a breath, he wasn’t sure how Shion heard him, but Shion must have, as he answered.

            The time traveler took one step forward, reached out and tucked Nezumi’s bangs behind his ear, and answered, “I’m thirty-one, Nezumi. I’m here with you. It’s okay, it’s going to be okay – It’s going to be amazing, but I have to do one thing first, and I need you to tell me what month it is, and how old you are. Can you do that? And then I’ll explain everything? Nezumi, is that okay? Remember to breathe, okay?” Shion was saying, his voice just like Nezumi remembered, almost like it was real – was it real? Was it a dream?

            Nezumi breathed. He felt Shion’s fingers brush his skin as the time traveler touched his hair. He felt the warmth of this man, and it made his knees weak. The time traveler had said he was thirty-one. That wasn’t possible. He was dead, he was dead, he was supposed to be dead.

            “Nezumi,” Shion said softly. “I promise it’ll be okay. Just tell me.”

            Nezumi had to think. He wasn’t sure. He had no idea what month it was.

            Another month without Shion.

            Another month of running from loneliness.

            Another month of pretending it had not yet caught up to him.

            “I don’t know the month. I’m thirty-one,” Nezumi exhaled.

            “Can I see your phone?” Shion asked, and Nezumi tried not to blink, worried that the man would disappear if he looked away.

            “I don’t have it with me.” There was no one to call him. No one Nezumi cared to communicate with.

            “Yes, you do. You’re holding it, see, Nezumi?” Shion asked gently, and Nezumi glanced down, was amazed to see his phone in his hand, realized he’d been holding it while waiting for his realtor to tell him when he could come back home.

            His realtor did not know Nezumi stood outside his house, but Nezumi had nowhere else to go.

            Nezumi held out his hand, wondered why it was so heavy, and Shion took the phone.

            “It’s April. Okay, here, I’m going to be right back, okay?”

            Nezumi’s heart was beating too quickly. He felt it in his eardrums, hard against his thoughts.

            “Where are you going?” he whispered. He didn’t entirely believe that Shion was standing there in front of him, but it would still hurt when he left.

            It always hurt when he left.

            Shion was pulling a glass bottle out of his pocket. The glass was strange and cloudy, and Shion opened it, held it up.

            “To see you. I’ll be right back. I’m only taking a sip,” Shion said, and then he pressed the bottle’s edge to his lips, tipped it slightly, took the smallest sip while Nezumi stared at him.

            “Shion?” Nezumi asked tentatively, still unsure – Was this real? Was this man really there? But then Shion was gone, blurring at the edges, disappearing completely, and Nezumi was left emptier than ever, staring at the space where Shion’s body had been.

            Nezumi inhaled, but no air filled his lungs. He wondered if he was broken. He felt as though he was.

            He closed his eyes, tipped his head back against the wall, reminded himself that there was nothing actually wrong with him – he could breathe if he wanted, he just had to concentrate.

            He tightened his closed eyes. He pressed his palms hard against them. It wasn’t dark enough, and he still couldn’t breathe – why the hell couldn’t he breathe?

            “Nezumi, I’m back, I’m back, Nezumi,” Shion said, and Nezumi could feel the man’s hands on his wrists, warm and gentle, pulling, but Nezumi refused to move.

            If he didn’t open his eyes, he could not see that this was another dream, another hallucination, another lie.

            “I’m back, let me prove it to you. Look at me, Nezumi. It’s going to be okay now, please look at me.”

            Nezumi let the man pull his hands from his eyes. He opened them, sucked in a deep breath when he saw Shion indeed back in front of him, solid and whole, offering him an encouraging smile when Nezumi looked at him.

            “Hi,” Shion said.

            “Where did you go?” Nezumi breathed.

            “To the past. This is the time traveling drug,” Shion said, holding up the bottle, and Nezumi stared at it, noted that it was still mostly full, the man must have taken the smallest sip, which explained his quick return.

            No, no it didn’t. Shion wasn’t supposed to return here. He was supposed to return to his present, and that wasn’t with Nezumi, the man did not belong with Nezumi – Nezumi knew this now.

            “Why?” Nezumi asked, because he had so many questions, but this was the most important.

            _Why, Shion?_

_Why did you come back here?_

_Why did you come back just to leave me again?_

            “I had to make sure I left you with some hope. I had to make sure you knew not to give up,” Shion was saying, but none of it made any sense.

            Nezumi was not left with hope. What was Shion talking about?

            “I left you a note when you were in the orphanage. I was hoping I’d be able to tell you directly, but I only took a small sip, knew when I appeared at the orphanage that the visitor’s desk wouldn’t be able to inform you I was there in time before I disappeared, so I had to leave you a note. I hope it was enough. Was it enough?” Shion asked, stepping closer, and Nezumi wanted to step back, tried to, but a wall was behind him, stopped him, pressed hard against his shoulder blades and nudged the backs of his heels.

            Nezumi shook his head. “You’re not real.”

            Shion’s expression sank. His eyebrows creased. “I am real, Nezumi.”

            “I disagree,” Nezumi said, unsure why he was arguing with this dream, this facet of his imagination.

            It was something to do, he supposed. He’d realized how long the days were, when he no longer spent his time waiting for his time traveler. There was no longer anything to fill the minutes. To flesh out the hours. To fold one day into the next.

            “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take the drug again after we saw that I could transport a penny, that I could transport a cure. When I went back to my present, I was sick for a long time. When I got better, I realized it wasn’t enough. Saving the lives that had been lost to the disease wasn’t enough.”

            Nezumi kept breathing. It was easier, with Shion here, whether Shion was really here or not. It didn’t hurt, so he breathed as much as he could, hoped some of it would count for when Shion left again.

            “So I went back to the previous formula for the drug, the one that didn’t harm me, the one that was safe to take. I worked on it for the greater portion of a year until I made it so that it could be injected into my body. It’s in me now. The drug works in that as long as it’s in my system, I’m not in my present. The more of the drug I drank, the longer I could stay with you. So I made it so that the drug would always be in me. So that it would be part of me. So that I would never leave your present, Nezumi,” Shion said.

            Nezumi’s stomach tightened. He wanted to hold on to something. He was going to slide down the wall.

            “But with this version of the drug, I couldn’t transport anything. Not even the cure. And I knew this, so I spent the rest of my time away from you learning about the technology that would be required to recreate the cure here, the equipment that wasn’t developed until my time. I’m going to develop it all. I’m still going to make this cure, I’ll just have to start from scratch, the very beginning. My field was mostly chemical-based, so it took a little longer than I wished to learn about the mechanics of the equipment I used to develop the cure the first time. I’m sorry I took so long to get back to you. I’m sorry I left you so long, but I’m back now. Forever, Nezumi. For real, this time.”

            Shion was always a genius, and Nezumi knew this, knew the man had the capacity to do unbelievable things, crazy things – but to stay with him, to come back to him, to make Nezumi’s present his own – that was too much. Even for Shion, that was impossible, it had to be impossible, Nezumi had already convinced himself it was impossible.

            “You’re going to disappear again,” Nezumi said, when he could speak, and Shion reached out, curled his fingers gently around the back of Nezumi’s neck.

            “I’m not. I wish you would believe me. I wish you would be as happy as me. We have forever, now.”

            “Stop saying that.”

            “Nezumi, it’s true. I’m sorry I took so long. I’m sorry I made you lose hope.”

            “This isn’t your present.”

            “It is now,” Shion insisted, and Nezumi could have hit the man.

            He hated him. He hated him so goddamn much.

            “It’s not. You don’t belong with me,” Nezumi snapped.

            “Nezumi…” the time traveler’s voice was a whisper. His fingers dropped from Nezumi’s skin.

            Nezumi closed his eyes again. When he opened them, Shion would be gone, and Nezumi knew this, took one last deep breath, braced himself, opened his eyes again.

            Red eyes loomed in front of his. The time traveler was standing inches from Nezumi.

            “I was meant to be with you. It’s why I always came to you, whenever I time traveled. I could have gone anywhere, I had no control over where I ended up – but it was always with you. And I will keep coming back to you. It used to be time, that kept me away, but I came back. And if you try to keep me away, I will fight you too. I will come back anyway,” Shion said, voice hard, and Nezumi stared down at him, didn’t even realize his eyes were burning until Shion reached up and brushed his fingers lightly under his eyelashes.

            “I thought you were dead,” Nezumi confessed.

            “I’m so sorry, Nezumi. I’m so incredibly sorry.”

            “I thought you were gone,” Nezumi whispered, his body nearly crumbling, and he tipped his head forward, rested his forehead on Shion’s shoulder, felt Shion’s fingers in his hair, exhaled the weight that had been crushing him, breaking him, shattering him, since Shion left him the last time.

            “I’m here now. I’m here,” the time traveler promised, and Nezumi let himself believe him.

*

(April; Nezumi 31, Shion 31)

Shion was appalled that Nezumi was selling their house.

            Nezumi knew this because the time traveler told him.

            “I can’t believe you were going to sell our house! I’m appalled.”

            “Appalled, huh?” Nezumi asked, pulling the time traveler closer to him.

            He hadn’t stopped touching the man since Shion had appeared five hours before.

            They sat on the couch, entwined in each other’s bodies, fully clothed, just talking and breathing and reminding themselves of what it felt like to be with the other.

            “You’ll keep it now, won’t you?” Shion asked, while Nezumi played with his hair.

            “Maybe. Depends on if I get a good offer.”

            “We need a house, Nezumi. And I like this one.”

            “Don’t worry, Your Majesty, I’ll consult you before selling it.”

            “Don’t sell it at all!” Shion protested, shuffling against Nezumi’s legs, and Nezumi felt something hard against his thigh.

            He glanced down, poked Shion’s pocket. “That is definitely not what I think it is, right?”

            Shion laughed. “No, it’s the drug,” he said, shifting so he could pull the bottle out of his pocket and show Nezumi, who stared at it.

            “Speaking of, how did that work? Did you time travel earlier today?”

            “I did. When I was creating a permanent version of the drug, I saved some of the original batch. I didn’t know when the permanent version would take me – I really lucked out, finding you at this age. I wish it had been a few months earlier, but the fact that I got you at the same age as I am is really amazing. But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring some of the temporary drug, just for any time traveling emergencies I might have.”

            “How did you even know it would work?” Nezumi asked, not liking the thought of Shion time traveling away from him again.

            “The drug I injected into my blood stream is now a permanent part of me. It’s at a certain concentrated dosage that will stay constant, keeping me at this present. But by drinking this drug,” Shion said, holding up the bottle, “it changes the concentration of the drug that’s inside me, so I’m transported somewhere else. At least, until this temporary drug wears off, and I return here, to you, just as I would have returned to my present before.”

            Nezumi tried to wrap his head around it all, but in the end, he really didn’t care that much. As long as Shion wouldn’t be disappearing, the rest didn’t really matter.

            “How did you get that here anyway?” Nezumi asked, glaring at the bottle, the one thing that could take Shion away from him again. “I thought you weren’t able to transport anything.”

            “The drug, of course, is the one thing that could travel time with me – It had to, as it’s what I used to travel. I froze it into a bottle mold, so the entire bottle is actually made of the drug, as well as the contents – so I knew I’d be able to take it with me,” Shion said proudly, and Nezumi narrowed his eyes further at the bottle in increased distaste.

            “Can I see it?” Nezumi asked, holding out a hand, and Shion blinked at him.

            “You won’t be able to time travel if you drink it. It has my gene sequence as part of its formula, remember?”

            “I don’t want to time travel,” Nezumi replied, and Shion hesitated, then placed the bottle in Nezumi’s hand.

            Nezumi curled his fingers around it, sat up, placed it on the coffee table, grabbed a book from the floor, and smashed the bottle with it in several quick motions.

            “What – Why did you do that?” Shion shouted.

            Nezumi looked at him sternly. “You’re not time traveling again. You belong here. You said it yourself. So stay here,” he said, voice hard, and Shion stared at him for a moment, eyes wide, before they crinkled as he smiled.

            “Okay, Nezumi. I won’t go anywhere.”

            “I’m not joking.”

            “I know you’re not.”

            “So you can stop with that ridiculous grinning,” Nezumi instructed, irritated.

            “I can’t. I’m so happy to see you. I missed you like crazy,” Shion said, smiling even wider, the nerve of this man.

            Nezumi tried to glare, but it was useless. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t upset. He was happy, and it was because of the time traveler, and it was strange and foreign but even more than that familiar, as if that made any sense – but nothing ever made sense, with Shion involved.

            “I missed you too,” he found himself saying, and when Shion kissed him it wasn’t a last kiss, or a first kiss, but just a kiss, a normal kiss, another kiss, and Nezumi realized this was his favorite kind of kiss of all.

*

(April; Nezumi 31, Shion 31)

Nezumi no longer had time for nightmares.

            He woke too often in the middle of the night, turned if he was not already facing the warm side of the bed, rubbed the sleep from his eyes and opened them and stared at the time traveler, always amazed to find him sleeping soundly beside him.

            Often, Nezumi did not need to turn. He fell asleep facing the time traveler, fell asleep watching him, fell asleep holding hands with him between their bodies so that even when his eyes closed, Nezumi could feel the time traveler’s presence. When he woke at night, he needed only to open his eyes, squeeze the time traveler’s limp fingers, reassure himself that the man was still there, then close his eyes again and wait for the next time he woke.

            Sometimes looking was not enough. Nezumi needed to reach out, to touch the time traveler’s cheek, to graze his fingertips over the time traveler’s lips, to weave his fingers into the time traveler’s hair. He developed the habit of sleeping with limbs intertwined with the Shion’s, legs weaved, arms thrown over his waist, hands creeping up his shirt.

            The time traveler never protested.

            It was not uncommon for the time traveler to even catch Nezumi in the act – but how could he not, what with Nezumi checking for the man several times a night? Nezumi would rub his eyes to find the time traveler staring back at him, the room too dark for Nezumi to read his expression, though once he thought it was along the lines of sleepy sadness.

            Even when he caught Nezumi, Shion did not speak. He let Nezumi turn to him, check for him, reach out and touch him, reassure himself that the time traveler had not yet left, and throughout the process Shion did not say a word.

            At least, not until three weeks into Shion’s return.

            Nezumi woke facing Shion, lifted a hand and touched Shion’s t-shirt gently before curling his fingers around the fabric. He was just accepting that the time traveler was still there, he was just closing his eyes again, when Shion woke as well, red eyes bright in the darkness.

            “Nezumi,” Shion whispered, voice muffled and careworn from sleep.

            Nezumi liked the way it pressed softly against his ears, like cotton. “Hello, Your Majesty.”

            He waited for Shion to say something, and the man took his time, looking at Nezumi for a long moment before saying even more softly, “Good night.”

            “Good night,” Nezumi replied. He closed his eyes, already looking forward to the next time he woke.

*

(June; Nezumi 31, Shion 31)

“When are you going to stop checking that I’m still here?” Shion asked, not looking up from the blueprints for the new cure-developing machines he was poring over.

            Nezumi did not stop staring at him. “You always disappear.”

            Shion looked up. “I’m not going to this time. I haven’t for months. I want you to stop worrying.”

            Nezumi shrugged. “You don’t always get what you want, Your Majesty,” he said easily, standing up and reaching over to grab Shion’s mug. He walked to the kitchen, refilled it, and when he came back, Shion was sitting up, blueprints apparently forgotten for the time being.

            “Yes, I do. I wanted to be with you, and here I am. Now I want you to stop waiting for me to leave you, because it’s not going to happen.”

            “It’s hot, careful,” Nezumi murmured, leaning down and placing the mug on the table next to the blueprints.

            “Are you listening to me?” Shion demanded.

            “Of course,” Nezumi replied, sitting beside Shion and glancing at the blueprints. He knew a bit about mechanics himself, but this technology was beyond his comprehension. He debated whether it was worth it to swallow his pride and ask Shion to explain the strange symbols.

            “I hate that you look at me like I’m about to disappear. Like you’re waiting. I don’t want you to wait anymore. You don’t have to wait anymore.”

            Shion said the words as if just the sound of them could change everything Nezumi knew. As if they could take back twenty years of watching this man disappear before his very eyes. As if they could erase the one thing that had been constant in Nezumi’s life – that Shion would always return, but he would always leave shortly after.

            It was not that Nezumi didn’t trust Shion. He knew the man was smart. Was not entirely surprised that Shion had found some way with that brain of his to make the drug a permanent part of his being.

            But simply knowing that Shion was most likely right had no effect on Nezumi’s sense of touch, which had learned warmth was not permanent. No effect on Nezumi’s sense of vision, which reflexively waited for the time traveler to blur at the edges. No effect on Nezumi’s sense of hearing, which naturally tuned in for Shion’s gasp, signifying his departure. No effect on Nezumi’s heart, which beat faster every time the time traveler was in his presence, having no reason to pace itself since a break was coming as soon as Shion disappeared again.

            What Nezumi knew, and what Shion continued to attempt to convince him, had no effect on Nezumi’s body, honed after years to watch this man, to release a thrill of warm surprise whenever it was confirmed that Shion had not yet left.

            Nezumi suspected Shion’s constant pleas would do nothing. Only time could change the way he had been wired. Only time could reverse the way he had grown up, expecting the time traveler to leave just as much as he expected Shion to reappear.

            “I think I know that, Your Majesty. I just need time to accept it,” Nezumi said quietly, still looking at the blueprints, and he heard Shion’s soft exhale beside him.

            “Okay, Nezumi,” Shion said, after a minute, and Nezumi felt the time traveler’s fingers weave through his.

            Nezumi did not wait for them to disappear.

*

(January; Nezumi 39, Shion 39)

“Okay, try two cups of sugar,” Shion said, handing Nezumi the measuring cup.

            “We did that last time.”

            “No, we did two and a half last time, and they were too sweet, so naturally we’d use less this time.”

            “We definitely used two cups last time,” Nezumi argued, pulling the clip from his hair and fastening his bangs back again, as they’d been slipping out.

            “I know we used two and a half. Come on, we already made three batches, I don’t want to do this all night. I’m hungry!” Shion complained.

            “Then we shouldn’t waste another batch on what we just did. Shion, face it, you have a horrible memory. I memorize lines for a living. I know what I’m talking about.”

            “It’s _my_ mom’s recipe! I think I’d know more than you!” Shion retorted, nudging Nezumi aside by the hip and scooping a cup of sugar himself.

            “Yeah, you’d think, but we’ve already made three batches, and according to you, none of them are close to your mother’s recipe, so clearly you’re not quite the expert you believe yourself to be. It’s time we stopped listening to you and did it my way,” Nezumi said, grabbing the bag of sugar before Shion could add another cup to the bowl.

            “How will doing it your way help? You’ve never even had my mother’s cookies!”

            “And I never will if you keep messing it up!”

            Both men glared at each other for several seconds before Nezumi sighed, leaning against the counter and placing the bag of sugar back beside the bowl. “This wouldn’t be a problem if you could time travel back to see how many cups of sugar we put in last time,” he complained.

            Shion blinked, his anger gone in favor of wide-eyed surprise before he relaxed, grinning slightly. “If I could time travel, why wouldn’t I just go into the future and ask my mom how much sugar she uses?”

            “So you’d prefer going a century or so into the future instead of just a few hours into the past?”

            “It’s not any less work to go further in time,” Shion countered.

            “Do you always have to argue with everything?” Nezumi muttered.

            “No, I just always have to be right,” Shion replied, smiling wider.

            “Of course you do, Your Majesty.” Nezumi raised a hand and wiped it across Shion’s cheek as if there was a smudge of flour on it.

            There wasn’t, but Nezumi sometimes simply wanted to touch the man, to feel his solidity, his presence, his warmth.

            He no longer woke several times in the night, making sure Shion was still beside him. He no longer checked on the man every time Shion walked into another room, ensuring he hadn’t disappeared.

            He no longer worried for him to leave, waited for him to go.

            But that didn’t mean Shion’s constant presence beside him did not amaze Nezumi everyday. It didn’t mean Nezumi looked at the man with any less wonder. It didn’t mean he was able to touch the man, even if only briefly, without marvel.

            Nezumi expected, on some level, that this might never change no matter how much time passed. He didn’t altogether mind. These feelings didn’t need to change, as one fundamental thing had – and Nezumi knew this now, believed it now, accepted it now.

            Shion was no longer his time traveler – Shion was simply his.

 

THE END


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